Every time my girl goes out of town for the weekend, I find myself completing an odd set of activities, at a loss for what to do with myself. My most recent solo weekend was a rainy one, so I was particularly restless, and suddenly I was caught up in a series of side quests: finishing my Spanish textbook, seeing a movie at the mall (Primetime), doing yoga with my cat, reading my library novel at the bar (Fortune Teller) with a glass of red wine, walking on the treadmill at my apartment gym, and helping a friend organize and declutter their house.
I also pondered the upcoming election, and wondered what will happen with the ongoing struggle for legalization and regulation of cannabis in Texas. I ruminated on the double standards of politicians, from war to sex crimes to smoking pot, and decided to pick up a nonfiction graphic novel I remembered from a trip a couple years ago to Austin Books and Comics titled Cannabis: The Illegalization of Weed in America by Box Brown, an artist who produces a weekly comic called “Legalization Nation.” I read the book in its entirety on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
In bold black-and-white cartoon frames, Brown details the story of cannabis, beginning with Hindu mythology and taking us all the way to the Reagan administration. I came away with some insights that seem particularly timely and, well, placely (copy editor will certainly remove this, hi Kat) to the present state of our politics here in the U.S. and Texas and our sociocultural relationship with cannabis:
False stories about cannabis have been around as long as the plant itself. Brown explains that as far back as the 1800s, officials claimed that smoking hemp caused insanity and gathered to discuss whether they had a moral obligation to outlaw the crop. Even back then, leaders surveyed the public, trying to gather evidence that smoking weed led to crimes and moral corruption, and clung to that narrative even when there was little evidence to support it.
I learned that one of the primary perpetrators of anti-cannabis propaganda was a man named Harry J. Anslinger, who was appointed by the U.S. Treasury as the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930. At first, Box illustrates, Anslinger was focused only on heroin and ensuring that the drug companies themselves were the only ones making and distributing it (hello, Big Pharma).
After alcohol prohibition came to an end, Anslinger decided to put all his focus on cannabis, rewriting the Uniform Drug Act to be heavily focused on cannabis and taking it on the road for an energetic campaign to instill fear about cannabis into the hearts of Americans. Anslinger had powerful friends in the newspaper business who used yellow journalism tactics to foment outrage among the public. Anslinger is also credited with one of the most infamous lies about cannabis still in circulation today: the gateway drug theory, an idea impressionable teens would first try marijuana, which would eventually lead them to try heroin, which would lead to their deaths.
Lawmakers and media have long worked together to manipulate the public into fearing the plant in service of their own agendas. Through Box’s narration and lively drawing of musicians with their trombones and dancers under the spotlight, I learned about the story of cannabis in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and the fictitious headlines and misinformation that were rampant everywhere. Media outlets spread stories that marijuana was connected to and caused crimes, almost always linked to people of color, especially those damned New Orleans jazz musicians. Box portrays Louis Armstrong and drummer Vic Berton sharing a joint behind a Hollywood club and their subsequent arrest.
With lawmakers and public opinion on their side, Congress passed a prohibitively expensive marijuana tax in 1937. Religious groups started making their own anti-cannabis literature at a rapid pace. In 1944, skeptical of the misinformation, NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia commissioned a scientific study, which revealed that cannabis use had no impact on the morality of its subjects, but the damage done by media cannot be quickly or easily undone by the facts of science, a problem that we as an American people have yet to solve.
Box details how, in 1970, Nixon commissioned another report, determined to back up his stance, which was firmly against legalization. The report ultimately recommended sensible policy and stated that cannabis is not physically addictive and that the gateway theory is demonstrably false, but Nixon, enraged by these results, trashed the report, and his administration went on to demonize cannabis to great effect. Nixon signed the Federal Controlled Substances Act in 1970, and his administration sought support in newspapers, churches, schools, on radio and television, telling everyone that the drug would destroy the morality of youth. Although now, according to the ad I heard on my radio just this week, the youth’s morality is actually being corrupted by James Talarico and his stance on supporting trans Texans. Moral outrage moves papers.
Cannabis and immigration have always been connected. This goes all the way back to Hernán Cortés, who invaded Mexico to claim it for Spain and, in addition to death and destruction as Brown points out, brought hemp seeds to Mexican soil. Many years later, cannabis culture made its way to the U.S. by way of the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. Box tells the story of a fight between white Texans and Mexican immigrants that led to cops finding cannabis on immigrants and claiming that it made them violent. Lettered in the speech bubble above a Texas politician’s head: “All Mexicans are crazy and this stuff makes them that way!” These racist sentiments in Texas were heightened as the Depression descended and white Americans began to want jobs that they previously found undesirable, blaming the lack of available jobs on Mexican immigrants, and claiming that they were smoking cannabis and committing crimes, things that white Americans, of course, would never do. These hateful conflations are no accident; they are a clever mechanism of the government and media to spark resentment and distract from the systems that are actually responsible for American suffering.
These stories confirm Santayana’s aphorism that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is both comforting and disturbing to know that the tactics of an administration to manipulate the will of the people is nothing new: older than social media, older than ChatGPT, older than the internet itself. Misinformation never dies, but it finds new and appealing ways to reinvent itself. While getting stoned may not be in my top five concerns as we head into the midterm elections, I can’t seem to stop noticing how it’s all connected and at the end of the day, it’s all political.
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This article appears in October 16 • 2026.
