Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (38 page)

The Murderers
, 1961

Adolf Hitler

J
UST A CIGARETTE
, you’d think, but it was made from a sinister weed and an innocent girl falls victim to this TERROR! MARIHUANA.

Does that word mean anything to you? Perhaps you have heard vaguely that is a plant that is made into a drug. But do you know that in every city in this country there are addicts of this dangerous drug? In London there are thousands of them. Young girls, once beautiful, whose thin faces show the ravages of the weed they started smoking for a thrill. Young men, in the throes of a hangover from the drug, find their only relief in dragging at yet another marihuana cigarette. How do they obtain this drug – since the police are hot on the trail of all suspected traffickers? They obtain it from so many unexpected sources that as fast as one is closed by the police, so another opens up. As well as nightclubs, reputable hotels and cafés frequented by agents, they operate from the least likely places, milliners’ shops, hairdressers, antique shops. But in Soho, in little lodging houses run by coloured men and women, the cigarette can be had for a secret password, and a very small sum of money. And many terrible tales are told about marihuana addicts.

One girl, just over twenty, known among her friends for her quietness and modesty, suddenly threw all caution to the winds. She began staying out late at nights; her parents became anxious when she began to walk about the house without clothes. They stopped her when she attempted to go into the street like that. At times she became violent and showed abnormal strength. Then she would flop down in a corner, weeping and crouching like an animal. Soon she left home, no trace could be found of her, but cigarettes and ends in her room were identified as marihuana.

How much does a marihuana cigarette cost? Just a shilling! Or in a ‘reefer club’, the low haunts where men, usually coloured, sell the cigarette, a puff can be had for sixpence. The fumes of the smoke are caressing, but they leave a somewhat acrid taste and a pungent, sickly smell. That is, to the beginner; the addict likes it, she likes it, not because of its taste or smell, but because it gives her abnormal strength and makes her indifferent to her surroundings. One day, passing a narrow street in Soho, I saw a crowd gazing at the third floor of a dingy house. A young and lovely woman, her clothes in shreds, stood perilously perched on a window ledge. Behind her was a man; he, too, was wild-looking and dishevelled; several times the girl made an effort to jump and the man feebly held her back. Soon, another man appeared. Coloured and strong, and hauled them both back. They were both marihuana addicts. As she disappeared, she could be heard screaming: ‘I can fly. Well, I don’t care if I die!’ Unconscious of herself, or any danger, she acted on the impulse to do the impossible.

I heard of one case, a nineteen-year-old dancing girl who was taken to a ‘reefer club’ by a party of friends. Soon a man was at her side, offering her a cigarette, for which he made no charge. It was a decoy. Soon she became one his best customers, spending half her salary on the weed. She sank lower and lower, her associates became criminals, drug lunatics and dope peddlers. Unlike opium, hashish and other drugs, which make their victims seek solitude, marihuana drives its victims into society, forcing them to violence, often murder. One man, in the delusion that his limbs were going to be cut off, killed his mother, father, brother and two sisters with an axe, another man would speak of people trying to corner him and hurl daggers at him. His sense of time, space and taste was distorted.

The seed is found in most hemp and birdseed. It isn’t hard to make a marihuana cigarette; the plant is dried before a fire or the sun for a few days. The leaves are then chopped up and mixed with ordinary tobacco. Marihuana alone would be enough to kill the average man, and then they are loosely rolled into cigarettes, slightly shorter than the normal. For women, this menace of the cigarette is greater than for men. Here is a true story that illustrates this fact:

A girl of twenty-one was persuaded by a coloured man to elope with him. For months her father searched vainly for his daughter. One night he saw a girl. Her eyes staring wildly in front of her, her hands groping, her head leaning on a man’s shoulder. He was horrified, but even more horrified when a second glance told him that this was his daughter, ravaged by neglect and ill-use. ‘I am not going home. I’m going to America,’ she wailed, when she saw her father. The man with her refused to give her up. The girl clung fiercely to him. There might have been a brawl but the father said ‘I have a friend outside who will call the police if i’m not outside with my daughter in ten minutes.’ Reluctantly his daughter went with him. In a few months she was cured of those nightmare weeks. It may happen to any man or woman. The next victim may be your best friend. A cigarette seems harmless enough but it is not so easy to check the craving. For marihuana can turn happy lives into hell.

circa
1960s
Daily Mirror

F
OR SOME YEARS
there have been rumors about the increase in drug taking in the South – vague, but always insistent rumors that the addiction to such drugs as morphine and cocaine was becoming a veritable curse to the colored race in certain regions. Some of these reports read like the wildest flights of a sensational fiction writer. Stories of cocaine orgies and ‘sniffing parties’ followed by wholesale murders seem like lurid journalism of the yellowest variety.

But in point of fact there was nothing ‘yellow’ about many of these reports. Nine men killed in Mississippi on one occasion by crazed cocaine takers, five in North Carolina, three in Tennessee – these are the facts that need no imaginative coloring. And since this gruesome evidence is supported by the printed records of the insane hospitals, courts, jails, and penitentiaries, there is no escaping the conviction drug taking has become a race menace in certain regions south of the line.

The effects of cocaine do not seem very different from those of alcohol. But in point of fact, cocaine exhilaration is much more marked and the depression far more profound and destructive to the nervous system. The victim is much more likely to have peculiar delusions and develop hallucinations of an unpleasant character. He imagines that he hears people taunting and abusing him, and this often incites homicidal attacks upon innocent and unsuspecting victims.

But the drug produces several other conditions which make the ‘fiend’ a peculiarly dangerous criminal. One of these conditions is a temporary immunity to shock – a resistance to the knockdown effects of fatal wounds.

Bullets fired into vital parts, that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the ‘fiend’ – fail to stop his rush or weaken his attack. A few weeks ago Dr. Crile’s method of preventing shock in anaesthetized patients by use of a cocaine preparation was described in these columns. A similar fortification against this condition seems to be produced in the cocaine-sniffing negro.

A recent experience of Chief of Police Byerly of Asheville, N.C., illustrates this particular phase of cocainism. The Chief was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro, with whom he was well acquainted, was ‘running amuck’ in a cocaine frenzy, had attempted to stab a storekeeper, and was at the moment engaged in ‘beating up’ various members of his own household. Being fully aware of the respect that the negro has for brass buttons (and, incidentally, having a record for courage), the officer went single-handed to the negro’s house for the purpose of arresting him. But when he arrived there the negro had completed the beatings and left the place. A few moments later, however, the man returned, and entered the room where the Chief was waiting for him, concealed behind a door. When the unsuspecting negro reached the middle of the room, the chief closed the door to prevent his escape and informed him quietly that he was under arrest, and asked him to come to the station. In reply the crazed negro drew a long knife, grappled with the officer, and slashed him viciously across the shoulder.

Knowing that he must kill this man or be killed himself, the Chief drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro’s heart, and fired – ‘intending to kill him right quick,’ as the officer tells it but the shot did not even stagger the man. And a second shot that pierced the arm and entered the chest had as little effect in stopping his charge or checking his attack.

Meanwhile, the Chief, out of the corner of his eye, saw infuriated negroes rushing toward the cabin from all directions. He had only three cartridges remaining in his gun, and he might need these in a minute to stop the mob. So he saved his ammunition and ‘finished the man with his club.’

The following day, the Chief exchanged his revolver for one of heavier caliber. Yet, the one with which he shot the negro was a heavy, army model, using a cartridge that Lieutenant Townsend Whelen who is an authority on such matters, recently declared was large enough to ‘kill any game in America.’ And many other officers in the South, who appreciate the increased vitality of the cocaine-crazed negroes, have made a similar exchange for guns of greater shocking power for the express purpose of combating the ‘fiend’ when he runs amok.

The list of dangerous effects produced by cocaine just described – hallucinations and delusions, increased courage, homicidal tendencies, resistance to shock – is certainly long enough. But there is still another, and a most important one. This is a temporary steadying of the nervous and muscular system, so as to increase, rather than interfere with, good marksmanship.

Many of the wholesale killings in the South may be cited as indicating that accuracy in shooting is not interfered with – is, indeed, probably improved – by cocaine. For a large proportion of such shootings have been the result of drug taking. But I believe the record of the ‘cocaine nigger’ near Asheville, who dropped five men dead in their tracks using only one cartridge for each, offers evidence that is sufficiently convincing. I doubt if this shooting record has been equaled in recent years: certainly not by a man under the influence of any other form of intoxicant. For the bad marksmanship of the drunken man is proverbial, while the deadly accuracy of the cocaine user has become axiomatic in Southern police circles.

WHY DO THEY DO IT
?

Many of the negroes, even those who have not yet become addicted, appreciate the frightful penalty of dabbling with the drug. Why, then, do so many of them ‘dabble’?

There are various facts that suggest an answer to this question, and evidence in the form of the opinions of physicians, officers and the cocaine users themselves that supports these facts. The ‘fiend’ when questioned, frequently gives his reason in this brief sentence: ‘Cause I couldn’t git nothin’ else, boss.’ That seems to be the crux of the whole matter.

A brief survey of conditions in the South and a bit of recent legislative history make it perfectly evident why the negro ‘couldn’t git nothin’ else’.

In many states in the South, the negro population constitutes from 30 to 60 percent of the total population. Most of the negroes are poor, illiterate and shiftless. If we include in this class the poor whites, who are on a par with the average negro in poverty, ignorance and general lack of thrift, we may reckon the aggregate number as representing about one person in three in the entire population. Governing, or even keeping in reasonable control, such a host is an onerous task, even when most of the individuals of the host are sober. The inevitable number of alcoholics adds to that task enormously.

The simplest way to remove this added menace – it seems simple, theoretically, at least – would be to keep whiskey out of the low-class negro’s hands by legislating it out of existence as far as he is concerned. And so Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia passed laws intended to abolish the saloon and keep whiskey and the negro separated. These laws do not, and were not intended to, prevent the white man or the well-to-do negro getting his accustomed beverages through legitimate channels. They obliged him to forego the pleasure of leaning against a bar and ‘taking his drink perpendicularly,’ to be sure; but a large portion of the intelligent whites were ready to make this sacrifice if by doing so they could eliminate the drunken negro.

Of course it is nothing short of ‘class legislation,’ this giving to the rich and depriving the poor. But what of it, so long as the discrimination applies to whiskey? Nothing, of course – provided, always, that those discriminated against do not find some substitute worse than the original trouble maker. But unfortunately for the negro, and for his community, such a substitute was found almost immediately – a substitute that is inestimably worse even than the ‘moonshine whiskey,’ drug-store nostrums, or the deadly wood alcohol poison. This substitute, as I have pointed out, is cocaine; and a trail of blood and disaster has marked the progress of its substitution.

New York Times
, Sunday, 8 February 1914

S
OME CONSIDER THAT
the medieval witch, cooking children to obtain their fat, desiring only infamy, was an invention of the inquisitors that ended up being generally believed. Others feel that they were in fact unusual beings, tending to look for artificial paradises in plants. There are also those who consider them to be representatives of the old, basically Celtic region of Western Europe. In any case, they were accused of organizing demonic rites, the so-called Sabbats, using ointments and potions. Very few people confessed to being witches until Gregory IX issued the first papal bull against them, granting the inquisitors the right to confiscate their property and belongings. Some time later, the number of sorcerers and witches had grown to grandiose proportions, and the
Roman de la Rose
, for example, declared that ‘one-third of all French women’ were witches.