The North Carolina Congressman Who Made Cannabis Illegal

In the summer of 1937, a congressman from Alleghany County, North Carolina named Robert Doughton rose on the floor of the United States House of Representatives to introduce a bill. The Marihuana Tax Act, as it was called, would effectively make cannabis illegal across the United States. The hearings had lasted two days. The American Medical Association had objected. Scientists had raised doubts. None of it mattered. The bill passed in minutes, and several members of Congress later admitted they thought they were voting on a tax on some foreign plant that had nothing to do with the cannabis their own doctors prescribed.

Eighty-nine years later, customers walk into our store in Salisbury, North Carolina, and ask some version of the same question: why is this so complicated? The short answer involves a lot of history. But a good deal of it traces back to one man — the architect behind the bill that Doughton introduced — a federal bureaucrat named Harry Jacob Anslinger.

Anslinger ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. He is the reason the word "marihuana" — a term deliberately chosen because it sounded foreign and threatening — replaced "cannabis" in public discourse for most of the twentieth century. He is the reason your grandparents were taught that cannabis made people violent and insane. He is, more than any single person, the reason we are still having this conversation.

Here is the part that should make you angry: he didn't even believe it.

Early in his tenure, Anslinger was on record calling the idea that cannabis caused violent behavior an "absurd fallacy." This was his honest assessment. Cannabis wasn't his concern. The problem was that Prohibition was dying — everyone could see it — and the federal apparatus created to fight alcohol was suddenly in desperate need of a new enemy. Without one, there would be no bureau. Without a bureau, there would be no Commissioner Anslinger.

So he went looking for stories. When a young man in Florida named Victor Licata killed his family with an axe in 1933, Anslinger decided cannabis was the cause — despite the fact that Licata had a well-documented history of mental illness and had never been shown to have used cannabis at all. The story ran anyway. Anslinger had understood something essential about American public life: fear is more powerful than fact, and a well-placed headline is worth more than a stack of scientific objections.

He collected these stories the way other men collected stamps. He called his archive the "Gore Files." He fed them to newspapers, to radio programs, to anyone who would amplify them. He hired writers to produce lurid cautionary tales. He was, in the most literal sense, the inventor of what we now call a media campaign. The product he was selling was panic.

The panic wasn't racially neutral. Anslinger's files are full of language that would be unprintable today — explicit descriptions of Black men and Mexican immigrants as the primary dangers, the suggestion that cannabis caused Black men to forget their place, to look white women in the eye. He said these things in memos, in congressional testimony, in public. He used the word "marihuana" specifically because it sounded Mexican, at a time when nativist anxiety was driving legislation across the country. The enforcement that followed reflected exactly that targeting — then as now, cannabis arrests fell hardest on Black Americans, at rates wildly disproportionate to their actual share of use.

This is not ancient, separable history. The stigma Anslinger built was racial from the beginning, and it shaped not just who got arrested but who got believed, who got research funding, and whose suffering was treated as a public health problem versus a criminal one. The tradition he established did not end when he retired in 1962.

By 1937, the machine had done its work. Two days of hearings. A NC congressman. A bill that passed before most members understood what it was. Thirty-two years of Anslinger's rule at the bureau — long enough to shape a generation's understanding of this plant, to entrench it in law, to export it to the world through a United Nations treaty he personally championed in 1961.

He died in 1975. In April of this year, nearly ninety years after the Marihuana Tax Act, the federal government finally moved medical cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III — the first meaningful reclassification in its history. A broader hearing on recreational cannabis is scheduled for June 29. The process is incomplete, contested, and moving slowly. We are still cleaning it up.

If you want to see what Anslinger's playbook looks like in 2026, we wrote about it recently. A statistic is circulating in the North Carolina General Assembly right now — a "600 percent increase" in cannabis-related ER visits among children — that has the same clean, alarming quality as the headlines he used to manufacture. It is being cited in legislation. It is doing a lot of work. When you put it next to the numbers nobody is citing — the fentanyl deaths, the alcohol hospitalizations, the firearms statistics — a familiar pattern emerges: selective alarm, a plant singled out, and a tradition of concern that has never quite been honest about what it was actually protecting. We looked at what the number actually means, and what's being left out.

The story of how we got here — and the people who are slowly, stubbornly pushing back — is the subject of my new book, People & the Plant: Medicine, Prohibition, and the Long Road Back. The Kindle edition is available now on Amazon, free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.