Was Harry Anslinger a racist? Are Harry Anslinger and Andrew Mellon related?

Tune in to episode 3 of the podcast series “Anslinger: The untold cannabis conspiracy.”

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Annie Rouse: In this series, we’ll uncover how Harry Anslinger’s influence on cannabis policy, infects much of society today, including war, civic unrest, prison, the opioid epidemic, Big Pharma, and life as we know it. I am Annie Rouse, your host and storyteller.

Annie Rouse: With us today is Mary Carniglia, the great-grand niece of Harry Anslinger. Mary is a longtime cannabis educator, who focuses on reversing the cannabis stigma, her uncle created. Currently, she works in a medical cannabis clinic and facilitates cannabis clinician’s Colorado meetings and the marijuana for medical professionals conference.

Annie Rouse: On last week’s episode of Anslinger the untold cannabis conspiracy, we learned about the effects of opiates, like heroin on the mind and body ,as well as Anslinger’s his first major drug bust in the Chinese opium dens, near Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.. By the time Anslinger became commissioner of narcotics, morphine and synthetic opiates like heroin and codeine had already flooded streets. Research dollars were pouring into the poppy plants power to reduce pain. After World War I, Germany who had held a powerful command and manufacturing synthesized opiates, started losing ground to Great Britain and realizing the lack of industry in America. The United States suddenly allocated funding into the field, investigating medical uses of opiates under Western medicine standards. Conversely, when Anslinger came into power, the world knew much less about cannabis, than it did about opiates. Italy had been one of the first countries to point out a need to regulate cannabis, given the troubles the country was having in its African colonies. But other nations thought regulating cannabis would be impossible, given its ability to grow like a weed. Even Anslinger himself was quoted expressing that cannabis would be impossible to regulate because it quote unquote grows like dandelions.

By the time Anslinger took power in 1930, scientists had already isolated and synthesized the poppy plants intoxicating compound, morphine. But it wasn’t until 1965, three years after Anslinger retired, that Dr. Raphael Masoom would isolate and synthesize cannabis’s intoxicating compound tetrahydrocannabinol, also known as THC. In most cases, Anslinger is coined for demonizing cannabis as marijuana. And while this is based on the policies he enforced. It is also based on anecdotal stories, describing Anslinger as an outspoken racist, who made a deal with corporate powers like the Hearst newspaper empire and DuPont chemical, to make cannabis illegal in order to remove hemp raw materials as a major competitor for products like paper and nylon. It is also often believed that Anslinger wife, Martha Denniston was the niece of Andrew Mellon. However, after researching these anecdotes and conversing with Mary Carniglia, Harry Anslinger great grand niece, we find that many of the opinions we have formed about Anslinger may have been skewed by misinformation.

So a lot of people say that Martha Denniston is a relative of Andrew Mellon.

Mary Carniglia: Yeah, and I can’t find anywhere where she is related. I did find one article where it said that somebody else that Uncle Harry was working with was married to one of them Melon daughters, but that wouldn’t have been Uncle Harry, that would have been his good friend. And then you know maybe, somebody associated the word niece because he was like an uncle because it was the best friend. Like who knows if that’s where they got the connection from, but I can’t find a single piece of evidence that says that Melon was a relative of hers at all. Now the Dennison’s had some money, like they they were well-off, but they were no where near the magnitude of money that Melon had yet.

Annie Rouse: Going through archives at the Penn State Penn State University I did come across a piece of paper that actually stated that Harry Anslinger or that Martha Denniston was a niece of Andrew Melon, but the paper was was an authored and undated and it was written in third person. So it was almost like someone had thrown it in there.

Mary Carniglia:  Yes, exactly and that’s why I feel like somebody saw that and just decided that, that was a fact, but never bothered to research any further in. And if I look at the evidence of what his life equated to, like what kind of riches he ended up with and that sort of thing. What kind of rich is any of my family had, they were poor, like the Angslingers did not have money. When they were married, they only had a little house, the one that she passed away in and out in Hollidaysburg. I don’t know if you got a chance to go out and actually see the house and Hollidaysburg, but not very big.

Annie Rouse: Yeah, it was pretty small, but he owned the house next to it right?

Mary Carniglia: He owned the property next to it and that’s what he rented out for income because I think they needed the income. If he had had money, I can’t see that they would have grown up in such a poor fashion. It just doesn’t seem like that would be a thing they cared about each other they took care of each other. So, if they had enough money he wouldn’t have let their relatives live in squalor, comparatively.

Annie Rouse: So he also is pretty well known or believed to be quite racist. Can you speak to that?

Mary Carniglia: So, I don’t think he was any more racist than the rest of society at that time. I just don’t believe that racism was his guiding force in any way, shape or form. I believe that was a that it was a sign of the times.

Annie Rouse: You know I definitely know from an article that I’ve read that he was a racist, as you said you know a lot of people were back then, but I knew I’ve come across in his archives an article where he was actually, it was 1934 and he was actually almost fired from his position because he wrote in a memo to different departments within the US government. He called an informant a quote ginger colored nigger and he got a lot of backlash from several individuals within other departments and he almost got fired for it. And so you know they were saying as a government official we did not condone this language and we would like to remove you from that from your position. And he ended up convincing his way out of it because he was quite the diplomat. But you know, I think because he was such a diplomat and because that had happened so early in his career, a lot of the information and quotes that, that are said to be said by Anslinger are likely not actually from Anslinger himself are from other individuals because he really wasn’t allowed to publicly, publicly be a racist.

Mary Carniglia: To publicly speak that way. And that’s what I and that’s what I keep trying to say, like every time they use different colorful language for quoting him, it’s all different language and I feel like those different languages came from different parts of the country where that’s the language that they were using at the time, but it wasn’t the language that he was commonly using in anything else. And I know that he quoted all of the other newspapers that he had gathered and he was using this as a sort of evidence to show that there was some sort of problem you know quoting other people to say these people have said that there is a problem, not just me, I’m not making this all up. You know, these are all the people and so, yeah in quoting all of those people he, I feel get misquoted or you know it’s the other people that said well it’s the first place and he was just repeating them.

Annie Rouse: A quick google search on Harry Anslinger, leads to racist filled language including Anslinger coining cannabis as marijuana because it related cannabis to Hispanic immigrants. However, Anslinger was not actually the first person to coin cannabis as marijuana. So who did? You’ll have to wait on that one. But what I can tell you is that even though Anslinger didn’t coin cannabis as marijuana and he is often misquoted on the Internet and in books. We do know that he had racist views and even though he may have been forbidden from publicly expressing his racism, it didn’t stop him from enforcing drug policies that attacked minorities. Nor, did it prevent him from helping certain white Americans, who had drug problems, while imprisoning black Americans for the very same drug problems.

Cannabis didn’t become part of Anslinger’s enforcement protocol, until it became federally regulated under the marijuana tax act of 1937, but that was not the first regulation set in motion against cannabis. Internationally, certain nations expressed concern at the 1912 convention and the 1925 convention, but most nations thought it was unimportant in the grand scheme of dangerous drugs. However, when we look back into cannabis policy in the United States, states had already begun to implement cannabis regulations prior to Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. A majority of the states that implemented anti-cannabis regulations, were Western states, whereas states east of the Mississippi River, were surprisingly some of the last to adopt. This pattern probably occurred because the eastern states commonly grew cannabis for industrial purposes, like paint and rope, as well as for certain medicines, like cough syrups, corns and potentially even asthma.

The THC content or the intoxicating content found in cannabis was rather low. Likely somewhere between 1 percent and 3 percent. But because we didn’t know what THC was at that time, we don’t know for sure, but we do know, was that this cannabis was called Hemp. Simultaneously, between 1915 and 1928 states commonly west of the Rocky Mountains were being introduced to a type of cannabis that was bred and grown in such a manner, to increase the floral material biomass that was known to produce the intoxicating content. This floral material was being imported from Mexico and was commonly smoked. California was the first to notice the increasing issue and became the first U.S. state to officially regulate cannabis in 1915, which is a fun fact because while California was the first state to regulate cannabis, they were also the first state to officially deregulate cannabis, as medical marijuana in 1996, 81 years later. Which oddly enough, 2018 also marks 81 years since America’s first federal regulation of cannabis. As I researched this topic more and more, I kept going back to the same question. Did Anslinger know that the cannabis in the agricultural fields of the South and Midwestern states was different from the cannabis coined as marijuana that was being imported into the U.S. from Mexico?

Mary Carniglia:  Basically, I feel like you know Uncle Harry was a front man. They used him for what the people would believe when concepts are too complicated for the general public. It’s really easy for someone to sell them on a simpler concept and I think they sold Uncle Harry on the simpler concept. And I truly believe that he had no idea that cannabis in people’s medicine was the same as the marijuana that the folks were complaining about to him. I don’t, I don’t think he believed those were the same exact product. I don’t think he thought that they were the same plants.

I have a really big suspicion that his older brother, my great grandpa was actually using cannabis to survive his asthma back then because he had an atomizer and had some sort of brown liquid in it. And I would love if I could get some sort of hospital record, to see what he actually was taking at the time, but he died in 1936. My great grandpa, from not being able to have his atomizer it was, it was in pieces on the ground and next to his hospital bed when my grandpa came in to see his dad’s dead body. Great grandpa was only 49, at the time, so it wasn’t like he was like the old guy. e was in pretty great shape, other than that. He rode motorcycles. He was a daredevil’s. He rode trick riding in silos, where he you know rode up the side of the silos and circles and stuff like that. And it wasn’t like he was just some sort of unhealthy person and just not having that atomizer, he asphyxiated essentially.

Annie Rouse: Now was he a boxer?

Mary Carniglia: No. My Uncle Charlie was a boxer. My great grandfather was manager, for a little while. Uncle Charlie won a bunch of his fights. He was like a prize fighter.

Annie Rouse: When your great grandfather, Robert died that was a pretty pivotal, pivotal time in Ansinger’s life. You know he’s about to come out the Marijuana Tax Act. Can you explain their, their relationship?

Mary Carniglia: As far as I know, they were pretty close. They are pretty close in age. My pa-pa, which is my grandpa, he described the relationship of all of the siblings like they got along really well and he thinks that they must have had great times at the dinner table because all of the nine siblings really enjoyed each other’s company. And after my great grandpa died, my uncle Harry still made sure to keep in special contact with my grandpa, which was his nephew and he would call him up and have him come over and meet him at the house and Hollidaysburg and have dinner with him and just talk to him. I think to you know help take the place of the fact that his dad was gone so young because my grandpa was only 16 when he lost his dad.

Annie Rouse: Wow. Yeah that’s very young. And you can kind of see that that in Anslinger’s life, he, he had very close relationships and had a deep care for a lot of the people that he was around, including his wife Martha and her son Joseph.

Mary Carniglia: Yeah. So Aunt Martha, was actually six years older than my Uncle Harry. I think that’s like not that common back in the day, but essentially she showed up with a 6 year old. They got married when Joe was 6 years old and just looked up that one. They got married on November 3rd of 1917 and Joe Leet was born in 1911 and then I think it was a few years after that Uncle Harry ended up adopting Joe as his own son. So Joe took on the Anslinger name, but Joe didn’t ever have any kids of his own.

Annie Rouse: Anslinger may have been a man of the people and if we look at it in that way, it may have led to the decision of appointing him as Commissioner. And Anslinger work and life experiences not only made him a man of the people, but also a man of international diplomacy. An area of expertise that opium control was already requiring and cannabis control would soon be desiring, but did Anslinger know that hemp and what the U.S. was suddenly deeming as marijuana were both produced from the same cannabis plant species? I want to believe Mary’s opinion, that he was mistaken, but from what I can tell, he knew that they were the same plant species. But did he truly care that the regulations he would later enforce would be detrimental to U.S. cash crop. Unfortunately, my assumption is no, he didn’t care because there were substitutions for cannabis as raw material at both industrial and medicinal levels.

While most cannabis conspiracies focus on the replacement of cannabis at an industrial level, for products like Hurst’s paper, DuPont’s nylon and cotton products, I think cannabis substituting opium at a medicinal level had far more to do with the prohibition of cannabis, in the forms of both hemp and marijuana. Because just two years prior to Anslinger’s appointment a breakthrough occurred in cannabis research. In 1929, a German researcher made a major discovery. He bred Cannabis indica into a slightly more modern day marijuana now. Cannabis indica at this time didn’t have the same connotation it has today as giving people a body high, instead Cannabis indica referred to its country of origin and the word indica literally translates to “from India.” It was also referred to as Indian hemp and was the source of hashish.

Mary Carniglia: The German researcher Dr Straub writes in his research that an experimental station in Germany “found it possible not only to breed Indian hemp, the source of hashish, but to obtain a product of such apparently high quality that it can be used to replace the foreign drug for medicinal purposes. The alcohol extractive content of the drug could be brought up to 18 to 20 percent.” It is unclear in the paper but I believe at this time Dr Straub is referring to opium as the foreign drug.” It is also important to note that our understanding of the intoxicating forms of cannabis in 1928 were very minimal. Of the 100 plus cannabinoids that we understand exist today only one cannabinoid had been discovered at that time and it was Cannabinol, commonly referred to as CBN, which is considered a minor cannabinoid. So while the alcohol extractive content of the drug may have been brought up to 18 to 20 percent, it was likely not just CBN, but rather a combination of THC, the major intoxicating cannabinoid, CBD the major non-intoxicating cannabinoid and CBN, a minor cannabinoid. Whatever the ratio was of the extractive content, we do know that they formed one tenth of a gram of crude resin into tablets and initiated a test trial on a human subject.

Well so they ended up giving this. They tested on rabbits and then dogs and then on humans and they ended up giving this one man took a actually to what they consider two doses of this cannabis extract.

And when I did some of the calculations he basically took anywhere between 50 to 100 milligrams of THC in one sitting for the first time ever ingesting anything.

Mary Carniglia: Oh Lord for his first time ever. That’s too much.

Mary Carniglia: So I mean I was thinking back in Colorado comparing that to like the famous gummy bears that Colorado has or are 10 milligrams per gummy bear and yeah they don’t allow you to sell anybody a package of food that has more than 100 milligrams in that whole package of food.

Annie Rouse: So he’s taken a lot of cannabis and this one sitting in and he’s ingesting it as opposed to smoking

Mary Carniglia: Right.

Mary Carniglia: So what a bad trip for that guy. Poor thing.

Annie Rouse: So can you, can you explain the difference between smoking marijuana versus ingesting it like a food form, like a tablet or gummy?

Mary Carniglia: Yeah I mean it’s all about the time when it hits you. For any kind of inhaled cannabis, it’s going to hit you right away, within the first minute to five minutes you should be feeling. And the effect, most of the effect is gone and go away in about 90 minutes, so pretty much all of it is gone away in a few hours. Maybe like three hours maybe four hours tops for inhaled and that’s really if you haven’t inhaled a lot of cannabis before that it would last that long or the ceiling would last that long with you. But when you eat it it takes a lot longer for it to heat your system because it’s got to go through your stomach and through your blood before it reaches your brain and then it’s going to be there for a really long time because it adheres to your fat cells and just swims around there in your body for longer and even you could be feeling that for a good eight to 12 hours possibly more. And the peak time may be a lot longer as well. And if you’ve done too much you’re just in it for the long haul. You’re just going to be feeling uncomfortable until that feeling goes away. And so that’s really the reason they put a cap on the recreational so that tourists wouldn’t come out and just get themselves into trouble and make themselves feel really uncomfortable right off the bat.

Annie Rouse: Yeah and there’s been I know there’s been some stories out there of people even with that going out there and eating you know you eat one and then you wait. Not thinking that it takes so long and then you eat 2 or 3 more and then all of a sudden two hours later you’re like oh my god

Mary Carniglia: Everybody’s looking at me.

Mary Carniglia: He said he’s like nobody’s here.

Annie Rouse: Exactly exactly.

Mary Carniglia: But then there’s also the reverse too. And usually it doesn’t happen when people have never said cannabis before but it still can because it has to do with your metabolism, it has to do with your liver, and a whole bunch of other variables that come into play to that end up saying whether you have a high tolerance to edibles as opposed to other forms. Me personally I’m a really high tolerance person depending on what the cannabis is in, I could eat, I mean at least 300 milligrams with no problem. And more if I had to.

Annie Rouse: Wow.

Mary Carniglia: But that same amount would really like knock another person out for a long time.

Annie Rouse:  Yeah definitely. I can’t imagine a non experienced user taking 300 milligrams in one sitting.

Mary Carniglia: No please don’t do that.

Annie Rouse: But yeah this guy about two hours after he ingests these 50 to 100 milligrams of THC he begins to notice his first reaction which – his eyes become moist and his eyelids become heavy, and over the next 15 minutes he becomes really tired and then he says he quote begins to shake like the sea, and then is overcome by “an unpleasant unstoppable laughter.”.

Mary Carniglia: [Laughs] Sorry to all of us and I’m overcome with unstoppable laughter. Oh no geez, why is laughter unwelcome?

Annie Rouse: And then he…

Mary Carniglia: If somebody was just there to laugh with him. He probably would have sounded a lot funnier.

Annie Rouse: Yeah probably so. Probably so.

Annie Rouse: So then he becomes a little bit dizzy so he lays down and he notices laughter diminishes and then he gets a sudden intense impulse to talk followed by an extraordinary feeling of well-being. And he says “My body seemed to be encased in a close-fitting, soft, moist-warm bathrobe my limbs felt lighter my bones seemed unnaturally long and seemed pleasantly furry warm. During this time I was in an extraordinarily pleasant mood.

Mary Carniglia: Isn’t it amazing, the creative writing skills that come out of the people that experience cannabis. I’m just saying.

Annie Rouse: Definitely so.

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Annie Rouse: During this intoxication he also expressed later which I thought was very interesting. He says quote My thoughts dropped everything hateful and evil. But this is much different than the way that Anslinger cites the claims against marijuana saying that it caused men to murder and rape people and things like that. Why do you think that, and he definitely read this report, so why do you think that after him reading this report and communicating with other individuals, it was in the early 30s that he would have read this – But why do you think that he would have still expressed such concern that marijuana was causing rape murder?

Mary Carniglia: So all of the information that he was being fed, that it was even a problem, were coming from newspaper articles, from basically other sides of the country, where he definitely wasn’t. And so I think that any other information, he just disregarded as not truthful, because this was the information that he had decided was coming in from too many different places and so therefore that must be the truthful information.

It’s really it’s really interesting if you think about anyone’s single life and what they believe and why they believe it. And it usually comes down to where that information came from and that person having faith in that in that source. Because everything that we have been told throughout our life could be completely false. We’ve just decided to believe certain things if we have no proof and can’t prove it scientifically to ourselves otherwise. Even science you know may change as the years progress. But it’s all about who you’re believing. And he wasn’t the, you know, he wasn’t the one who made up that marijuana was the stuff of murderers, other people were telling this and this is coming from all sides of the United States. I feel like sensationalism sensationalism played a huge part.

And the fact that nothing could be really proven. I mean we still we have Snopes and still sometimes things that Snopes says are false end up you know being true. After another year’s worth of digging in. So I think he was just going on what he had been said and he decided that that’s what his truth was, that there was something wrong with cannabis Wrong’s marijuana not with cannabis because again I don’t think that he knew that they were the same thing. Exactly.

I just want people to know that I’m doing my best to reverse my Uncle Harry’s influence in believing that cannabis was harmful and trying to educate people on what cannabis really is and take a lot of the stigma that has been built up over the years away.

And I don’t think that he was as involved in the science as, as I am for sure. Or as any of the scientists were it was just about who was being scattered around America and what they were scared of and what they said they needed protection from. And originally he was hired because of the opium problem and in my opinion it was just because you know in places where they were doing opium together, different cultures were coming together. And maybe that made people uncomfortable.

Annie Rouse: You’re right he was not involved. He wasn’t you know conducting any research scientific research himself he was on the committee on drug addiction, which will actually talk about in the next episode. But he was more on the committee as an advisor and liaison really between these international regulations that were being created and you know really just being there in order to make regulations based on the science that all of these researchers were discovering at that time which at that time I mean the Committee on drug addiction was very new and influential and was was really making breakthrough research with, mostly opium was their their biggest focus and I don’t think they really knew anything about what they were talking about.

Mary Carniglia: I don’t think that any of the stuff that was going on back then as far as addiction was was yet, had yet figured out what that all was. I think it was pretty far from the reality of addiction.

Annie Rouse: Oh definitely. I mean they had you know they had studied opium and morphine the derivative of opium and then the like in the early 1800’s and throughout the 1800’s and then heroin hit the shelves in the late 1800s. Hundreds and five to ten years after it hit the shelves they were like oh my god this is really addictive. We got to pull this off the shelves you know. And by the 30s they didn’t really know you know what is addiction and what causes addiction, which we’re still trying to find. And a lot of other stuff that you would think that we would know by now and would have discovered. But we still have limited knowledge on that just like we do on the endocannabinoid system, which directly relates to how cannabis impacts your body and those receptors within your body and the cannabinoids that we are naturally producing.

Mary Carniglia: Yeah I think we’re up to like 8 discovered receptors now at this point aside from the first two.

Annie Rouse: That’s unbelievable.

Mary Carniglia: Pretty cool huh. I can’t remember if they’re calling them numbers or letters but I think they’re calling like the next one that they’re finding different letters.

Annie Rouse: Very cool. So Anslinger was also I would say back to the last point on marijuana causing men to murder and rape and you had said that he was really reading information and repeating that information. And you know I think that that definitely has truth in it because a lot of the archives that have gone through have been reports from states where they’ve where they’ve said this man already smoked a joint and then he went out and killed his parents. It’s like OK was it coincidental that he smoked a joint and went out and killed his parents.

Mary Carniglia:  Exactly,was it the joints fall or we already have some preconceived going to kill your parents gene or something. But yeah there was no there there was no scientific proof but because everyone was so scared. I mean it’s just like today you know jumping on bandwagons of avoiding something just because you’re scared without doing further research on whether you should actually be scared or not, but scare tactics are effective.

Annie Rouse: What are interviewee Mary states about the little knowledge we had towards medicines during the 1930s is quite accurate. At the time the medical world knew more than they had ever known before and they were on the verge of exponentially improving their knowledge base. But that doesn’t mean that they were always accurate in their decisions.

When they conducted this first cannabis trial on humans they had never tested this particular extract concentration on man before in a controlled environment. And the amount they gave him, in my opinion and probably in many other people’s opinions, was entirely too much for someone’s first time. It made the test subject not just high. He was extremely high. But the effects he experiences are almost identical to what we know today. And what Mary explained like increased appetite and paranoia. We encounter these effects because of the way that the cannabinoids interact with our brain’s endocannabinoid system which actually was not discovered until the early 1990s.

We will discuss the system more in the upcoming episodes. But this discovery was essential to our understanding of cannabis, because we could identify how the brain interacts with the cannabinoids that the cannabis plant and the human brain produce.

While we can now formally research this system and its effects, the man in the study and various studies that came after this 1928 research provided medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, and regulators, like Anslinger, insight into how this plant’s compounds may help or hurt our world. Beyond bringing out feelings of peace and paranoia, the test subject is overcome by several other feelings that may have been monumental in understanding in this time.

Let’s hear what else we learned from this man’s experience.

Annie Rouse: Well so back to this man that was really high – so during his state of intoxication he says the thing about how his thoughts dropped everything hateful and evil. He also says that he spoke of the great difference between the actions of hashish and alcohol which I thought was very interesting.

Mary Carniglia: Yeah, like so opposite. One of the things they keep bringing up with some of the folks that have been reporting to the CDPHE, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, they have been doing research on – Are you impaired? At what level are you impaired? And specifically focusing on driving. And are you impaired when you’re driving if you’re on cannabis. And the one point I keep trying to drive home to those guys is to make sure to ask this in their research because these are ongoing studies is to see if you can tell how well connected the person is who’s using cannabis, to how and I for lack of a better term how messed up they feel, because when you are using alcohol or drinking alcohol you’re not connected to the level of intoxication that you actually are. You’re a poor judge of your own intoxication.

So somebody will say, “hey you feel like you can do such and such” and you’ll probably say, “Yeah sure I totally feel like I could do that” and maybe you can maybe will fail, but when you are intoxicated with cannabis and especially if you’re a brand new cannabis user, if you haven’t used cannabis before, or a lot, you will be very connected to the feeling that you don’t feel like you can do something so somebody will say hey you feel like you can go out and drive right now. You’d be like “No, I really feel like I should sit here for a little while longer and they don’t feel like I can go out and do that.”

And that’s one of the main differences that I want people to understand with why there aren’t that many car accidents from having cannabis be legal in certain states like, “well why didn’t everybody then get out in her car and start driving and crashing into each other?”

Because you didn’t feel like going anywhere if you felt intoxicated on cannabis and you were more connected to how intoxicated you felt on cannabis as opposed to with alcohol.

Annie Rouse: Very good point. That’s fascinating.

Mary Carniglia: The one consistency that they have found is that if you are a regular cannabis user, and by regular I mean every day you use cannabis, that using cannabis does not impair you. But if you do not use cannabis every day, then you will feel impairment from it.

Annie Rouse: And this guy was definitely connected to his level of intoxication.

Mary Carniglia: Yes, descriptively so.

Annie Rouse: So he says about three hours after ingesting the two doses he ends up becoming very hungry, as usual. Right and then he took an hour long nap and when he woke up he couldn’t tell if he was still intoxicated. So he was maybe slightly, probably was still pretty high considering how much he took. And then four hours later he ended up getting up from his from his couch and was tired but was not intoxicated and he was still able to work. And then he says that he slept very well that night and the next morning “did not have the slightest after effect”

Mary Carniglia: Yep, sounds about right.

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Annie Rouse: Can you explain some of the side effects of ingesting a lot of marijuana. Is there the marijuana hangover?

Mary Carniglia: There can be if you haven’t used cannabis before, especially if you haven’t eaten it before. A lot of times some of the doctors call it “priming the pump” and warn the patient, you know, it’s not going to feel it’s actually the same, the very first time you use this and I personally feel like it’s your endocannabinoid system waking up out of its deep sleep and remembering what to do with all these cannabinoids once it gets hit with them. But if you have not ever eaten cannabis before,, in general, the next morning after you’ve woken up from sleeping it off people do usually feel groggy and that can last for a few hours or it can last the rest of the entire day just because they endocannabinoid system is exhausted from from all its new work.

But that wears off. So if you eat something again the next evening it won’t be as you won’t feel as groggy the next morning and that’ll taper off. If you consistently keep using cannabis your tolerance will build up a little. Your endocannabinoid system won’t be as exhausted from all this new work and you’ll wake up feeling refreshed after after a few times. It’s different for everybody but it could be anywhere from four days in a row to seven days in a row before that completely goes away.

Annie Rouse: And some of the other more obvious ones that a lot of people know about are a thirst,, hunger, dry throat, and fatigue which we just we just discussed

Mary Carniglia: And paranoia. And paranoia is a really funny one because over the years I’ve realized that if you can compartmentalize that paranoia, that you can actually make it go away or stop affecting you the way that it does. So if you are if your mind starts racing and you start feeling paranoid about things, if you can think of the word paranoia and then ask yourself “am I just feeling paranoid because of the cannabis or is this some real thought process that I’m needing to deal with.” In general you’ll realize that these aren’t normal thoughts that you would be freaking out about. And so once you realize that, that’s what they mean you can compartmentalize it, and just sort of put it away in the corner, and your heart will flow right back down because you’ll realize it’s not something that you supposed to be worried or excited about that it’s just that cannabis giving you that feeling.

Annie Rouse: Yeah.

Annie Rouse: And that was something that this man that tested the cannabis he said that his mood was wholly euphoric but he frequently showed irritating or distrusting and distrusting I think is definitely part of the paranoia. I’ve learned that eating sugar can actually help sometimes with some anxiety or paranoia.

Mary Carniglia: I’ve heard eating anything actually helps. I’ve heard eating yogurt can help. I’ve heard drinking milk can help. I’ve heard just eating anything in general. You know once you start munching off some of the some of the high you’re just not as affected anyway. Plus you’re distracted by delicious the food is definitely so.

Annie Rouse: Now this is way different compared to opium which you know if you’re taking opium as a pain reliever then the next day you would feel…

Mary Carniglia: Here’s the funny thing about that. Because opium. I think there is straight opium that came freshly from the Poppy. And then there’s opiates which are being sold as heroin and sold sometimes in opium’s name. And the two are technically different makeups, like the chemical makeup is different, how it reacts, it’s addictive level, but I think a lot of people have sort of squished the term opium and opiates together in their minds, not realizing that the basic flower itself was much less harmful than the opiate derivatives that we’ve really been playing around with, for the last hundred years.

Annie Rouse: Yeah definitely. And you know it’s it’s an interesting point that you make there because that is really the irony in the whole thing is that, there was, when they first found morphine the derivative of opium, they were trying to find the drug that would have all the same actions as morphine but without the euphoria and without the addictive property that came afterwards. And what they ended up creating was heroin, and they synthesized morphine to create heroin, and then they’ve now created fentanyl and OxyContin.

Mary Carniglia: Right.

Annie Rouse: And all the other other opioids.

Mary Carniglia: But I’ll tell you I’ve had actual opium before and it is not they have made it out to be. It it doesn’t give you some sort of immediately addicting physical nature. You don’t feel like crap the next day. So all of the things that come along with the synthesized anything don’t come along with the regular straight up flower.

Annie Rouse: Yes so what they ended up creating in this synthesis was some of these drugs have been very beneficial, but a lot of them have actually been a lot more harmful than the actual natural plant form, which really has happened with cannabis as well, when they synthesized cannabis – way more an actual cannabis.

Mary Carniglia:  Much more dangerous. They just should not mess with their nature.

When she’s that complicated. She’s supposed to you know she created it for us. We don’t have to do anything to those things. Doing too much to it has really been the downfall.

Annie Rouse: The world’s first controlled trial on a higher potency of cannabis turned out to reveal promising information about the drug like the great differences between hashish or cannabis and alcohol, but the difference in how a test subject felt towards others was far different than what society was led to believe. The test subject speaks out of the dangers. Yet, while he is high he doesn’t go out and murder people or rape anyone. Unlike the stories Anslinger repeated or the yellow journalism and Hearst papers claimed or the popular 1936 film Reefer Madness portrayed.

Instead the test subject eats a snack. He takes a nap. He calls a friend, he has wondrous insights into his life and others and he drops all evil and hate from his mind. He also makes sure to note that he was somewhat tired, slept well and had no side effects. The next morning the test subject doesn’t write about how he wanted him to go out and get high again, which at the time likely gave the researchers reason to believe that unlike opiates, there was no related addiction. Dr. Straub and his partners must have thought that they had hit the jackpot! A potent cannabis indica which could replace the foreign drug opium, without any side effects. They’d found the Holy Grail!

But wait a minute.

If they found the holy grail in 1928, why are we still searching for it today with not so promising pharmaceuticals like OxyContin. Well that is because the same time the research paper was published. The Bureau of Social Hygiene under the National Research Council created the Committee on Drug Addiction, a committee of doctors, researchers, pharmaceutical corporations, and of course our favorite drug czar Harry Anslinger.

Over the next few decades, the men involved with the Committee on Drug Addiction would change the path of the pharmaceutical industry and the way the world views drugs forever. We’ll learn who they were and how they got their start on the next episode of Anslinger: The untold cannabis conspiracy.”

EPISODE END

CREDITS

Annie Rouse: Thank you for listening to this week’s episode sponsored by Anavii Market. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast. Write a review and tell your friends to tune in. For more information visit. ThinkHempyThoughts.com and follow us on Instagram and Facebook at ThinkHempyThoughts. It’s like think happy thoughts but hempy.

Annie Rouse: This podcast is written and produced by A.Rouse Production, with facilities provided by The Media Collabortory, and audio support by Jake Mannino.

EPISODE 4 TEASER

Annie Rouse: On the next episode of “Anslinger: The untold cannabis conspiracy,” we expose a group of 11 men charged with developing Big Pharma as we know it. We also talk to a pharmacologist and toxicologist Dr. Pritesh Kumar about scientific and intellectual breakthroughs in the 1930s that spurred our opioid epidemic.

Dr. Kumar:I think a lot of the difficulties that we’re faced back then are still faced today. For example, we have a plant material and you’re looking to identify what isn’t there. It’s very challenging because there could be one compound in there or could be a thousand compounds in there and that you know we don’t have reference standards for.