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arrestee, a Mexican maid who insisted that she was raising marijuana tea for stomach trouble.120 The maid was arrested under an Orange County ordinance that made it a misdemeanor to possess or cultivate marijuana.121 This ordinance (fittingly from a county whose sheriff led the opposition to California's 1996 medical marijuana initiative) is the earliest evidence of local government interest in joining the Board’s anti-cannabis efforts.

Meanwhile, in Northern California, marijuana remained undiscovered. As late as 1920, an exposé of the San Francisco drug scene, The Hop-heads, by journalist Fred Williams, portrayed vices ranging from morphine and cocaine to tobacco and prostitution, but failed to mention marijuana.122 Sacramento police arrest logs from the era mention opium, morphine, cocaine, yen shee, and opium pipes, but not Indian hemp or loco-weed.123 Not until 1921 did the San Francisco Examiner mention that "Mexican hasheesh" or "marihuana" was being smuggled into the Presidio army base by unknown culprits.124 Two years later, “marihuana” made its début in the New York Times.125 By 1924, arrests were being reported in Sacramento. 126

Other states passed laws against cannabis before World War I: Massachusetts in 1911;127 Maine, Wyoming and Indiana in 1913; and Utah128 and Vermont in 1915.129 City ordinances were also enacted in New York City in

121 The ordinance was passed two years previously, i.e. about 1917. In a pattern prefiguring modern medical marijuana cases, the woman, who had been growing a dozen plants, two of them over 14 feet tall, was rebuked by the judge, who declared, “That stuff isn’t growing for stomach, but for your head.” Santa Ana Daily Register, July 7, 1919, p.3.

122 Fred V. Williams, The Hop-heads: personal experiences among the users of “dope” in the San Francisco underworld (W.W. Brunt, San Francisco, 1920).

123 Sacramento Jail Register - Record of Arrests, 1913-1916 et al., Sacramento Archives.

124 "Presidio Peril Feared; Hunt for Hasheesh," San Francisco Examiner, August 7, 1921, p.3.

125 "Marihuana is newest drug," NY Times , Jan 11, 1923, p 24. Prior to this, New York City was said to be experiencing an upsurge in “hasheesh,” originally introduced by the Turks and Armenians, but also used in the “Spanish section” and Greenwich Village, according to a report in the San Francisco Examiner (April 10, 1921). Note that New York City had already banned cannabis in 1914.

126 "City News in Brief,” Sacramento Bee, Nov. 12, 1924 p. 5; ibid., July 15, 1925, p.5.

127 The date of the Massachusetts cannabis law has sometimes been given as 1914, as stated in the 1931 Surgeon General’s Report, “State Laws Relating to the Control of Narcotic Drugs,” p. 150 (so also in Hamowy and Bonnie & Whitebread). However, cannabis indica and sativa were included in earlier versions of the Massachusetts pharmacy law (1911, Chapter 372) and (1912, Chapter, 283).

128 According to Prof. Charles Whitebread, the Utah law was enacted pursuant to the condemnation of marihuana in August, 1915 by the Mormon church, which had learned of the vice from a band of Mormon colonists returning from Mexico. Before that, however, the Utah Board of Pharmacy had requested the California Board of Pharmacy to send a copy of the state’s 1915 pharmacy amendments (which included the provision against cannabis), saying that Utah wished to adopt the California law: Minutes of the Cal. Board of Pharmacy, Feb. 2, 1915 (State Archives, Sacramento); cf. Charles Whitebread, “The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States,” Speech to the 1995 California Judges Assoc. annual conference, posted at www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/ History/HISTORY.HTM.

129 Compilations of early cannabis laws appear in Bonnie & Whitebread, The Marihuana Conviction, p. 354, and Hamowy, op. cit., pp. 10-11. The latter corrects several inaccuracies and omissions in the former for the period before 1930, but both miss California’s 1913 and Massachusetts’ 1912 laws.