The Original 1937 Marihuana Tax Act Historiographers:

The Secondary Historical Sources Written Between 1963 and 1974

This section assesses the sources and dissects the interpretations of the eight works written between 1963 and 1974 upon which subsequent assessments of the MTA have relied. Put another way, until I included a paragraph about the MTA on pages 130-131 of my book published in 2000 (Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History), no authors writing about the subject conducted additional research in archival sources of consequence. A few who accessed other documentation are listed on a separate page, but none of them utilized significant new material that shed additional light on the origins of the MTA. Additionally, very few authors consulted the material published beginning in the 1940s that detailed how the U.S. Government implemented the MTA during World War II; one can gain a clear sense of the intent of the law by reading those works.[1] Finally, very few writers actually read the law sufficiently closely to understand its provisions. Most importantly, most do not understand the distinctions in the provisions that declared only certain parts of the plant are considered “marihuana” under the law.

The early works referenced by all subsequent authors are best considered in chronological order of publication, which is the sequence in which they are presented in sub-pages of this section.

[1] See, for example, James F. Hopkins, A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky (Lexington: UK Press, 1951); John H. Garland, “Hemp: A Minor American Fiber Crop,” Economic Geography, 1946, Vol. 22, pp. 126-132; Robert Marsh, “The Illinois Hemp Project at Polo in World War II,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 1967, Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 391-410.