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After a week of what seems like endless Reefer Madness stories from the Denver television stations, we thought we’d leave you with some vintage pot hysteria from 1911.
Yes, in case reports of wild Mexicans wasn’t enough to scare the hell out of white America, the thought of it killing babies was sure to do the trick.
This June 1911 piece from the Montezuma Journal out of Cortez is a recap of a “Food Department” report listing a number of “soothing syrups” that were going to be banned as “baby killers.” Sadly, the name was probably correct considering the main ingredients in these over-the-counter drugs included morphine, powdered opium and chloroform. But, of course, marijuana gets lumped in among the ingredients for Victor Infant Relief:
The report concludes with this: “All of the above mentioned drugs are pure poisons. The government is doing the right thing in exposing these products but should go still further and not allow them to be placed on the market.”
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Interestingly, most of the chemicals mentioned remain on the pharmaceutical market today. Meanwhile, cannabis was marginalized and only now is seeing a comeback in the medical field.
We tracked down an image of the Victor Infant Relief from the AntiqueCannabisBook.com site (an awesome resource if you’re a cannabis history nerd):
For more Colorado cannabis history, check out our Cannabis Time Capsule archive.
