Have you ever met this funny reefer man? (Reefer man!)
Oh, baby, baby, baby, reefer man, reefer man (Reefer man!)
If he trades you dimes for nickles
and calls watermelons pickles
Then you know you’re talkin’ to that reefer man (Reefer man!)
—”The Reefer Man,” Cab Calloway (1932)
Go into any convenience store nowadays, and you’ll see little evidence of this country’s long history of persecuting cannabis and its aficionados. With THC seltzers in the aisles and gummies behind the counter, you’d have every reason to believe that stoners have won the long battle against prohibition of the funny cigarette on whose behalf so many have been subject to draconian punishments. And we aren’t talking about California or New York, but New Orleans, where you can walk into almost any grocery store or brewery and get high enough to ascend to another reality in broad daylight without so much as a whiff of stigma.
But looks can be deceiving. In November 2025, a continuing resolution to end the government shutdown was passed with a provision that could lead to the end of the legally consumable non-medical THC market. This would devastate the industry in Louisiana, which comprises roughly 2,500 licensed retailers and accounted for $4.3 million in state tax revenue in 2024. The stigma surrounding all things cannabis may have been neutralized in the minds of the public, but then, common sense never did much factor into the equation when it comes to shutting down cannabis access. The forces of government control won’t rest until the devil’s lettuce is back to what they feel is its rightful classification: a public enemy destined for continual suppression.
In 2022, the state legislature legalized delta-9 THC edibles for people 21 or older. Now, Louisiana is trying to dismantle the consumable hemp industry. In November of 2025, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, along with several other state AGs from around the country, signed on to a letter sent to Congress asking that the ban of consumable “hemp-derived THC products” be added to the government continuing resolution, arguing that the industry was unregulated and a threat to public health.
The “public health” language is an old tactic, having been used for over a century to demonize cannabis (and drugs broadly) and those who use it. And though the origins of the American anti-cannabis crusade have largely disappeared from public memory, it all started in jazz-era New Orleans. It was a time of finely-tailored suits and flapper dresses and people stumbling out of speakeasies, drunkenly ambling between the Quarter or Storyville, where smoky rooms were packed with bobbing heads and tapping feet as the likes of Louis Armstrong performed. And it was in these jazz halls and drinking establishments where the early War on Drugs would equate the dangers of liberatory Black music and cannabis usage. Before long, this demonizing narrative would spread throughout the rest of the country, riding on the coattails of touring jazz musicians.
A variety of THC drinks, most of them created by local companies, are stocked in the cooler at Stein’s Market & Deli.
Weed, pot, reefer, dank, grass, ganja, herb, chronic, muggle—cannabis has gone by a plethora of names. Perhaps the most consequential was bestowed in 1920, when Dr. Oscar Dowling called it a “powerful narcotic.” Dowling knew drugs—he dedicated his life to helping people experiencing substance use disorder. In 1919, he ran the Louisiana State Board of Health, which oversaw three Louisiana clinics that treated people with substance use disorders in Shreveport, Alexandria, and New Orleans. He had experience with people with opioid addictions, but in 1920 weed came to his attention. According to a letter he wrote to then-Governor John M. Parker, weed was “causing exhilaration, intoxication, [and] delirious hallucinations” among the populace.
It was true that marijuana use was on the rise, generally entering the country through the Mexican-American border. In New Orleans, it was brought in by Caribbean sailors. The incident that specifically caught Dowling’s attention was one in which a musician was convicted of forging a doctor’s signature to obtain cannabis. After Dowling’s warning, the governor was shocked that there were no federal laws prohibiting the drug. In a letter written to the prohibition commissioner, Governor Parker claimed that two men dropped dead when consuming the substance. The anti-weed hysteria was triggered by reports coming out of New Orleans.
El Paso, Texas was the first city in the country to have anti-cannabis laws, starting in 1914. They were mostly designed to target Mexican immigrants. In fact, the widely used term prior to 1910 was cannabis. The term “marijuana” was popularized as a way to racialize the drug, stoking anti-Mexican sentiment. The El Paso Herald proclaimed in one story, “native Mexican herb which causes the smoker to crave murder is held accountable for two deaths and a bloody affray on the streets of Juarez,” stressing the race and nationality of the user. But whereas Texas tended to use cannabis to emphasize the danger posed by Mexican nationals, in New Orleans the war on weed was a public health-focused moral panic, with a spotlight on what the drug would do to the city’s youth.
And it’s not hard to see why, when reading some of the stories coming out of that era. In particular, there was paranoia over a rise in youth crime. Throughout the early to mid-1920s, papers like the New Orleans Morning Tribune ran headlines like, “SCHOOL CHILDREN FOUND IN GRIP OF MARIJUANA HABIT BY INVESTIGATORS.” According to Southern Spaces magazine, a Times-Picayune article quoted a New Orleans police detective who stated that people used “mirauana” cigarettes to get up the nerve to commit crimes, since it could “produce recklessness unrivaled by other ‘dope.’” He added that one cigarette contained “criminal inspiration for four or five youths.” The detective rounded out his interview by asserting that a man killed his wife under the influence of the drug. Many more articles like that would fill public consciousness, as the local press exacerbated these fears to sell papers.
Colliding with the growing popularity of weed and the attending backlash was the skyrocketing popularity of jazz. While bud came in through the ports, it’s believed that what would become jazz gestated in the 1800s in Congo Square. By 1916, the term “jas” would enter the local lexicon, eventually becoming jazz, which in the 1920s was primarily played by and for Black folks. Walking through the streets near the riverfront, you could hear jazz booming from riverboats. While in the heart of the Quarter, you could even catch musicians playing on horsedrawn carts. The merging of cannabis and jazz came around that same time, when the Volstead Act was enacted in 1919 and booze was made illegal. Some without access to booze turned to bud. As for the jazz musicians who fell in love with marijuana? For some it helped with their creativity, while for others, it was an escape.
Louis Armstrong, who tried it for the first time at 26, before the federal ban, once wrote: “I had myself a Ball… That’s why it really puzzles me to see Marijuana connected with Narcotics-Dope and all that kind of crap… It is actually a shame.” In addition, Satchmo saw in it a source of deeper healing: “it makes you feel good, man. It relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro. It makes you feel wanted, and when you are with another tea smoker it makes you feel a special sense of kinship.”
There was a lot that could happen to “negroes” in the early 1900s. The second incarnation of the Klan was on the rise, and Jim Crow laws degraded and humiliated many Black people. An analysis of lynchings from 1882 to 1930 posited that for every 100,000 Black people in Louisiana, about 44 would end up victims of lynching. Only Florida, Mississippi, and Kentucky were higher on the list, with Florida accounting for about 80 lynchings per 100,000 Black persons.
In 1900, the year before Armstrong was born, the Robert Charles riots shook New Orleans: a four-day campaign of racial terror that started after Robert Charles, a Black man, got into a gunfight with law enforcement. Fourteen people were killed in the ensuing chaos, and racist Jim Crow ideology was further cemented into the minds of white New Orleanians. In 1921, when Armstrong was 20, the Tulsa massacre leveled the neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street,” when more than a thousand homes and Black businesses were decimated by white mobs jealous of the Black residents’ progress. In the process, somewhere between 100 to 300 Black people were murdered.
For Black Southerners and musicians like Armstrong, cannabis could be a kind of numbing agent to deal with the weight of a society designed to break their spirits. Another way of dealing was music, particularly jazz. Jazz and weed became so synonymous amongst the people of the nightlife that parlors started to create rooms just for those who wanted to smoke and listen to live music. But the drug’s prominence in conjunction with speakeasy raids led to more well-to-do citizens and the media associating the drug with African Americans, jazz musicians, and “underworld” whites, furthering the stigma that the drug and music genre would carry for years. Despite how unfounded the cannabis panic was, the public stigma stuck.
The New Orleans drug wars kicked off on May 18, 1923 after an article in the Times-Picayune stated there was a new victim of the “dangerous” drug: Randall Sharp, who was hospitalized. Doctors at Charity Hospital said there was an epidemic of people being sent to the hospital over weed usage, at a rate of “two or three persons” every day. Two days after that article, at the behest of New Orleans District Attorney Robert H. Marr, Jr. and medical professionals, “sale of ‘cannabis indica,’ better known as ‘Mari Juana’ or the ‘Mexican happy smoke'” was banned. On May 29, City Council prohibited possession and distribution with a penalty of $25 and 30 days imprisonment. Over the coming months there were raids as the Louisiana medical, psychological, and legal communities continued to hammer home the dangers in the media. The role that New Orleans’ media played in inflaming the perceived downsides of marijuana that would later spread around the nation throughout the War on Drugs cannot be overstated.
By the mid-1920s the local media was hyperfixated on the marijuana menace, and the city had become a model of how anti-drug activists and law enforcement work in conjunction to impose anti-drug initiatives. Dr. A. E. Fossier published a paper titled “The Marihuana Menace” in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal in 1931, which inspired New Orleans District Attorney Eugene Stanley to write a paper called “Marihuana as a Developer of Criminals” shortly after for the American Journal of Police Science. It’s generally understood that the framing of weed use in New Orleans is what stuck at the federal policy level. The papers published by Stanley and Fossier were used in the 1937 U.S. Congressional hearing on weed and praised by the main architect of the American War on Drugs, Harry Anslinger.
Anslinger used the information coming out of New Orleans to bolster his argument to Congress for a national ban, and in 1937 he got his way. Months following the hearing, marijuana was criminalized without the consultation of the American Medical Association. The AMA’s legal counsel at the time protested this action: “We are told that the use of marihuana causes crime… But yet no one has been produced from the Bureau of Prisons to show the number of prisoners who have been found addicted to the marihuana habit.”
In order to enforce his War on Drugs, Anslinger, who often contradicted himself when explaining the downsides to weed, set his sights on entertainers. Specifically, he had a disdain for jazz. Racism underpinned his obsession with weed and jazz. He once stated, “[Black peoples’] Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.” On another occasion, Anslinger pointed to who he considered the culprit for the growing weed problem: “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers… Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” In the reality of 1928, however, 75% of those arrested for breaking Louisiana’s 1924 anti-weed law were American-born whites. But Anslinger had his targets, and he had no intention of letting facts get in his way. He ordered his agents to raid jazz musicians’ homes, and to “shoot first.”
The New Orleans drug wars that went national would spread due to the Great Migration, when millions of Southern Black folk fled north, bringing with them not only their belongings and dreams, but jazz. And as jazz spread, so did the weed culture that came with it. From New Orleans to Chicago, from Chicago to New York, wherever jazz touched, weed could be found, and songs about “reefer” became all the rage. Plenty of jazz songs filled establishments with lyrics that were odes to their chosen drug: “The Reefer Man” by Cab Calloway, “When I Get Low I Get High” by Ella Fitzgerald, “The Reefer Song” by Fats Waller, and “The Weed Smoker’s Dream” by Kansas Joe McCoy, to name a few. Riding on the coattails of weed and jazz was the long arm of the law.
Public views on cannabis have grown more positive over time, which is how New Orleans businesses are able to have prominent advertisements of consumable THC in their establishments. But the desire to overregulate or outright ban the substance still lingers in the halls of power, from Washington DC to Baton Rouge.
Today, many establishments in New Orleans are now left with concerns that their businesses will be negatively impacted or eradicated altogether. Due to the government shutdown resolution, the legal THC amount in consumable products would drop from 0.3% THC by dry weight, to just 0.4 milligrams per container. Roughly 95% of THC products contain more than the new proposed limit. Local shops, companies, and distributors could potentially lose as much as 85% of their sales. Despite the knowledge that THC is a relatively harmless chemical when used responsibly, the National Association of Attorneys General claims the product could potentially “kill children,” echoing the unfounded fears of the past that proliferated in public health discourse.
With the threat of eradication hanging over local businesses, it’s important to remember how we got here. The anti-weed panic in New Orleans in the 1920s and 1930s can not be extricated from the current attempt by state AGs to have legal THC products banned. The hostile—and mostly willful—ignorance that surrounds the policing of weed and its users has officially gone on way too long. But in the grand tradition of prohibition, people will always find a way to get high. That’s because weed, as Armstrong suggests, offers a rare source of everything from calm to exhilaration. It brings creativity, interconnection, and clarity of thought. It has its dangers, as all strong medicine does, but there’s a reason it is most feared by enforcers of institutional control. It offers liberation of all kinds, and encourages free-thinking—two things the powers-that-be reliably seek to snuff out.
Top and bottom photos: a case at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum displays various cannabis treatments used for a litany of ailments, from gout and mania to alcohol withdrawal and the pains of child birth.
Photos by Dan Fox
