Mayor LaGuardia's Committee on Marihuana

The year was 1938 and the city was New York, but it could have been Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago—or for that matter any other large American city in the late thirties. The nation's press was having a field day with lurid marihuana headlines: in New York City pushers were reported selling marihuana to thousands of innocent school children, and the city administration was under fire.

Most American officials demagogically played along with The Marihuana Myths rather than question their scientific validity. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 had just been passed and the Draconian Regulations No. 1 came sharp on its heels. Police raids—which sensation-hungry newspapers provoked and dramatically featured—were commonplace, and thousands of marihuana users, as well as sellers, were arrested and jailed. Against this background of American officialdom's knuckling under to the marihuana myths, the incorruptible figure of Fiorello H. LaGuardia stands in welcome bas-relief. Instead of yielding to the panic on September 13, 1938, New York's most popular mayor asked the world-renowned New York Academy of Medicine to make a scientific and sociological study of the reported use of the drug in the City of New York. In response to the Mayor's request, the Academy appointed a special scientific team (known as The Mayor's Committee) which comprised thirty-one eminent physicians, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, pharmacologists, chemists, and sociologists. This impressive scientific body was charged with the responsibility of conducting a painstaking, two-part scientific study. The Academy of Medicine delineated the scope of the study as follows:

(1) a sociological study dealing with the extent of marihuana smoking and the methods by which the drug is obtained; in what districts and among what races, classes, or types of persons the use is most prevalent; whether certain social conditions are factors in its use; and what relation there is between its use and criminal or antisocial acts; and

(2) a clinical study to determine by means of controlled experiments the physiological and psychological effects of marihuana on different types of persons; the question as to whether it causes physical or mental deterioration; and its possible therapeutic effects in the treatment of disease or of other drug addictions.

The Mayor's Committee received the full cooperation of the New York City Police Department: six police officers, four men and two women, were trained as social investigators by the Committee to assist it on a full-time basis in obtaining sociological data. In addition, the entire medical staff of New York's prison hospital on Riker's Island actively assisted the thirty-one members of the Committee in the study. Also, the Goldwater Memorial Hospital provided the Committee with two wards, office space, and a staffed laboratory to conduct experiments.

Never before or since has so thorough and meticulous a scientific study been made on marihuana. Issued in 1944, the Mayor's Report still remains the most impressive collection of factual finding in the whole body of scientific literature on marihuana—a literature that goes back thousands of years. Mayor LaGuardia was sharply aware of the value and scientific impact of the Report. In his foreword he wrote:

The report of the present investigations covers every phase of the problem and is of practical value not only to our own city but to communities throughout the country. It is a basic contribution to medicine and pharmacology.

N.B. for the sake of brevity, and bearing in mind the general interest of the lay reader, several lengthy technical sections of the Report (relating to a detailed breakdown and analysis of methods and procedures employed in the study) have been eliminated. The editor has in no way, however, added to or altered any of the original wording of the text, nor have any of the findings and conclusions been omitted.

SOCIOLOGICAL, MEDICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHARMACOLOGICAL STUDIES

by the Mayor's Committee on Marihuana

GEORGE B. WALLACE, MD, Chairman

E. H. L. CORWIN, PHD, Secretary

MCKEEN CATTELL, MD

LEON H. CORNWALL, MD

ROBERT F. LOEB, MD

CURRIER MCEWEN, MD

BERNARD S. OPPENHEIMER, MD

CHARLES DILLER RYAN, MD

DUDLEY D. SHOENFELD, MD

Ex Officio

PETER F. AMOROSO, MD

KARL M. BOWMAN, MD

S. S. GOLDWATER, MD

JOHN L. RICE, MD

Special Advisers for Clinical Study

KARL M. BOWMAN, MD

DAVID WECHSLER, PHD

Supervisors of Clinical Study

J. MURRAY STEELE, MD

S. BERNARD WORTIS, MD