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been bribed for that purpose. Since then strict orders prohibiting the use of mariahuana by prisoners have been enforced.

The poisonous weed always finds favor among the soldiers, who mix it with tobacco and smoke it. The sale of the weed to the soldiers is strictly prohibited, and severe punishment is provided for anyone guilty of the offense.

The habitual user of mariahuana finally loses his mind and becomes a raving maniac. There are scores and scores of such instances in Mexico. It is said that those who smoke mariahuana frequently die suddenly.

The smoking of mariahuana is a seductive habit. It grows upon a person more quickly and securely than the use of opium or cocaine....

Ironically, in light of the present-day controversy over medical marijuana, one of the very first stories about marijuana in the U.S. concerned its cultivation for medical purposes, as reported in the Pacific Drug Review (1909):55

James Love, who conducts an agricultural experimental station near Cuero, Texas, has been granted special permission by the State Agricultural Department to introduce the deadly Marihuana plant from Mexico into Texas. He has therefore obtained several pounds of seed, and believes that the plant can be put to good commercial use as a drug, to be used in the cure of asthma, tuberculosis, etc. The marihuana weed is known as the most harmful of narcotic influences, however, and its leaves, when smoked in the form of cigarettes, produce a species of insanity which frequently ends in a horrible death. It is said that Empress Carlotta, the wife of Emperor Maximilian, had her mind dethroned by drinking coffee in which marihuana leaves had been placed. She left Mexico an incurable lunatic at the time of the overthrow of the French in that country, and has never regained her faculties.56 When used in a legitimate way it is possible to force this deadly thing to prolong life rather than to sap it, and Mr. Love is working to this end.

Remarkably, neither of the preceding articles explain that the deadly marihuana is precisely identical to cannabis indica! This fact might well have surprised readers, given cannabis' reputation for pharmaceutical safety. Although overdoses of cannabis were known to induce temporary quasipsychoses and non-fatal poisonings, cannabis was never regarded as a deadly drug. "Who ever heard of anybody being killed with cannabis indicas...?" scoffed the Pacific Pharmacist, criticizing a proposed anti-narcotics bill that would have required a death's head to be marked on a sweeping list of purported poisons.57

56 Carlotta’s madness did not appear until after her return to Europe, and thus cannot be credibly attributed to marijuana (this myth may have its origins in the fact that she fantasized about being poisoned). Egon Corti, Maximilian and Charlotte of Mexico , Vol. 2, Chap X (Knopf: New York and London, 1928). The Carlotta legend appears in a different form in another article, “Plants Cause Madness: Startling Effect of Mexico’s Substitute for Tobacco,” printed in the Washington Post, March 9, 1913 p. MT-3. There it is stated that she was poisoned by a tea made from seeds of “totrache,” a relative of “loco” weed.

57 "Do We Want the Mann Bill?," Pacific Pharmacist 2:305 (December 1908).