Brooklyn: Former Cannabis Paradise

1951: Deputy Inspector Peter Terranova, left, head of Police Narcotics Squad, and General Inspector Frank Creta and Associate Superintendent Augustine Ferretti of the Sanitation Department at a disposal scene.

I recently was turned on to an interesting blog from the Brooklyn Public Library. It is an older entry, from 2011. I had known that New York, at one point, was an epicenter for cannabis culture. I have read about the scientific inquiry that Fiorello La Guardia (former NYC mayor, namesake of LaGuardia Airport) commissioned during the early throes of prohibition. A study, by the way, that found that cannabis was not the devil-flower that the prohibitionist blowhards claimed it was.

What I didn’t know was that cannabis grew, literally, all over New York City in neighborhood lots. Also unknown to me, was that the man who would become the main driving force behind New York’s anti-pot warfare, held the title of Sanitation Department Chief Inspector. That means it’s possible that the head garbage man of NYC spearheaded the movement. That man was John E. Gleason. In the early 1950’s, Gleason formed the White Wing Squad, whose charge it was to seek and destroy cannabis. During their tenure, the White Wing Squad confiscated and incinerated 41,000 pounds of cannabis, with 17,000 pounds of that coming from Brooklyn alone.

So much has changed, so much has stayed the same. It was bittersweet to read that, during Gleason’s hate-parade crusade, there were rational, authoritative figures who questioned his “facts” and wondered about the virtues of criminalizing cannabis. One such man was John Murtagh (try not to let your mind run wild with Lethal Weapon jokes/references). Murtagh was a State Supreme Court Justice. He roundly rejected punitive reactions to drug use and went so far as to bring up scientific studies that showed that cannabis was safer than tobacco and non-addictive. If you have the time, listen to this 1951 interview with Murtagh. He was light years ahead of his time regarding cannabis.

Also worth noting is that, even in those early days of prohibition, the crackdown on cannabis heavily targeted minorities. From the days of the aptly named “White Wing Squad” to modern times where NYC is the marijuana arrest capital of the world, this drug war has sought out and unfairly pursued Blacks and Latinos. As the 2012 Drug Policy Alliance report notes, “In the last decade since Michael Bloomberg became mayor, the NYPD has made 400,038 lowest level marijuana possession arrests at a cost of $600 million dollars. Nearly 350,000 of the marijuana possession arrests made under Bloomberg are of overwhelmingly young Black and Latino men, despite the fact that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young Blacks and Latinos.”

In this image, a young woman who appears to be African American, sits by while a DA inspects the some 80lbs of cannabis found in her hotel room.

There are more odd little points of interest littered throughout the blog. It is definitely worth looking into more deeply.