(1941) Marihuana - William Irish

Marihuana is a 1941 novella by Cornell Woolrich, published under the pen-name William Irish. The story is about a man who goes on a murder spree after being exposed to marijuana for the first time.

Woolrich's depiction of marijuana is in keeping with popular views of the time which saw the drug as causing "insanity, criminality, and death."[1] Inhaling marijuana smoke initially makes King lethargic and he loses all sense of time—something that continues throughout the story as he thinks several days have gone by despite it being the same night; his murder of Eleanor is prompted by his insistence that a half hour has passed since she ordered room service, when in fact it was only five minutes. King and his friends also experience munchies which causes Bill to raid the ranch's kitchen for food; King later notes that "the hempseeds create a false, insatiable appetite." King's lethargy soon turns to hallucinations and paranoia, which causes him to embark upon his murder spree.

Though King and his friends are all middle class, they travel to Hell's Kitchen, an area that had been a center for bootleggers during Prohibition. The "ranch" operates similarly to a speakeasy—the proprietor bribes local police officers, visitors leave their cars several blocks away so as not to draw attention to the ranch, and a bouncer guards the door, inspecting each person through a peephole before letting them enter. Peculiarly, Woolrich has the ranch operate as a buffet, with each visitor paying a cover charge in exchange for an unlimited amount of marijuana.

The term "ranch" is Woolrich's own invention, derived from the slang term for marijuana, "grass." Characters also refer to it as "reefer," though they always describe the joints as cigarettes.Source

(1931) Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy is a long-running comic strip featuring a popular and familiar character in American pop culture,[1] Dick Tracy, a hard-hitting, fast-shooting and intelligent police detective. Created by Chester Gould, the strip made its debut on October 4, 1931, in the Detroit Mirror.[1] It was distributed by the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate. Gould wrote and drew the strip until 1977.[1]

Chester Gould introduced a raw violence to comic strips, reflecting the violence of 1930s Chicago. Gould did his best to keep up with the latest in crime fighting techniques; while Tracy often ends a case in a shootout, he uses forensic science, advanced gadgetry and wits to track the bad guy down.Source

Cannabis was FDA approved until 1941, THC (marinol) reapproved in 1985

A core argument to maintain the prohibition of marijuana asserts that marijuana is not FDA approved medicine. How accurate is this claim?

Marijuana actually enjoyed FDA approval from the creation of that government agency until 1941, but marijuana itself has never subjected to the FDA approval process. The active ingredient in marijuana, THC, has been FDA approved. Synthetic psychoactive ingredients from natural marijuana pass FDA muster, but natural plant-engineered THC does not.

Pure THC, an FDA approved, schedule 3 controlled substance, commonly know as Marinol, doesn’t create criminals. It also doesn’t treat patients near as effectively as natural cannabis has been proven to do.

Marinol costs hundreds of dollars for its patients to use each month. If medical marijuana could be bought at a shop down the street, the FDA approved pharmaceutical would be out of business in five minutes. Organic cannabinoids cost far, far less than the FDA approved synthetic pill.Source

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9Tb4TMibk0&feature=player_embedded

Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934

(1932) Scarface

Scarface (also known as Scarface: The Shame of the Nation and The Shame of a Nation) is a 1932 American gangster film produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Howard Hawks, and written by Ben Hecht based on the 1929 novel of the same by Armitage Trail. The film stars Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, Karen Morley, Osgood Perkins, C. Henry Gordon, George Raft, Vince Barnett, Edwin Maxwell, and Boris Karloff. One of a number of Pre-Code crime films, the film centers on gang warfare and police intervention when rival gangs fight over control of a city. Source

(1932) Aldous Huxley - Brave New World

Brave New World is a novel by Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurism. Huxley answered this book with a reassessment in an essay, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final work, a novel titled Island (1962), both summarized below.

In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.[1]Source


Drug Content in the Plot

To maintain the World State's Command Economy for the indefinite future, all citizens are conditioned from birth to value consumption with such platitudes as "ending is better than mending," i.e., buy a new one instead of fixing the old one, because constant consumption, and near-universal employment to meet society's material demands, is the bedrock of economic and social stability for the World State. Beyond providing social engagement and distraction in the material realm of work or play, the need for transcendence, solitude and spiritual communion is addressed with the ubiquitous availability and universally endorsed consumption of the drug soma. Soma is an allusion to a mythical drink of the same name consumed by ancient Indo-Aryans. In the book, soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free "holidays", developed by the World State to provide such inner-directed personal experiences within the socially managed context of State-run 'religious' organizations, social clubs, and the hypnopaedically inculcated affinity to the State-produced drug as a self-medicating comfort mechanism in the face of stress or discomfort, thereby eliminating the need for religion or other personal allegiances outside or beyond the World State.Source

(1932) The Phantom President - Maybe Someone Ought To Wave the Flag

[4:14] for a portion of a speech that includes herbal medicines It also contains an anti-prohibition bit.

(1936) Modern Times - Searching for Nose Power Scene

The link should start you right at the title card with the words "Nose Powder". My source for this one is the awesome book Reefer Movie Madness: reefermoviemadness.com