The Strange Story of Mexico’s First Narco, the Drug Panic He Helped Incite, and the Revolution to Come

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Meet Mexico’s first narco. For public enemy number one, José del Moral, was a bit of a disappointment. As the police dragged him out of his house on Calle San Jeronimo in the center of Mexico City on July 20, 1908, he cut a disheveled figure. Grimacing from his toothless mouth, he was in his late fifties, grey-haired, and dressed in a tattered waistcoat and trousers. Of course, the tabloid press of the time didn’t call him a narco. They had yet to come up with such convenient shorthand. Instead, he was “the capital’s poisoner in chief” and “the king of the grifos [stoners].”

Del Moral was not royalty, but he was the capital’s biggest marijuana wholesaler. Three days earlier the police had raided his warehouse south of the city. Here they had discovered thousands of marijuana cigarettes. The newspapers had reacted with full-blown hysteria. “Marijuana factory” with enough marijuana “to poison the whole capital” ran El Imparcial. “The terrible cannabis indica of the healers is the opium of our lower classes,” opined the slightly more cerebral El País.

Mexico’s first narco—meet Mexico’s first drug panic.

Tabloid censure brought swift justice. Within a month, Del Moral was tried and sentenced to five months in jail. His crime was a new one—selling marijuana without a proper license.

Del Moral might have been Mexico’s first bulk dope slinger but he was not illiterate. “The king of the grifos” was something of an autodidact. And his appeal letter—written from inside Mexico City’s notorious Belén prison—outlined rather neatly the tension between this first drug panic and his and many others’ more reasoned appreciations of the drug.

Doctors, he claimed, had denounced marijuana while knowing nothing about it. They quoted no studies and ignored the everyday application of the drug. Instead, they simply adopted the popular prejudices of women and children, he said, “who run when they hear its very name and believe the herb has come from hell.” The tabloids were even worse. They parroted the doctors’ lies and added to them, making up tales of marijuana-induced madness and weed-fueled murders. “How,” Del Moral asked, “can marijuana be considered dangerous for health . . . when it is used as a medicine for infinite ailments?” Surely Mexicans should trial the drug rather than rashly condemn it?

Lost for over a century beneath a stack of case files, Del Moral’s appeal letter now seems oddly prescient. Two years after his imprisonment, the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution would drive thousands of his countrymen to start using marijuana both as a medicine and as a relaxant. It was a trial—albeit a wild and impromptu one. Marijuana would go from a rarely used herbal remedy to the drug of choice for the Revolution’s soldiers. After the Revolution, it would gain an audience among urban bohemians and the city’s poor.

Yet, the marijuana craze was never more than a subculture. It was localized, short-lived, and by the 1930s had started to fizzle out.

In contrast, the panic that Del Moral described did not go away. It proved much more enduring. It was one of the world’s first drug panics. It was an important moment, a turning point in Mexico’s attitudes to narcotics. It would provide the template and many of the stories for subsequent panics, including America’s own terror over marijuana use during the 1930s. And it would inspire a set of laws and prejudices against marijuana that would shape a century of Mexican drug policing. To this day, Mexicans hold some of the least progressive attitudes in the world to marijuana. Sadly, the first marijuana panic had little to do with the drug’s actual effects. It had much more to do with prejudices about the people involved in the trade.

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As Del Moral was keen to point out, he was not the instigator of marijuana use. Mexicans had been using the drug’s healing properties for well over a hundred years. The Spanish had originally brought cannabis to the country in the sixteenth century. Their idea was to make hemp. But it soon escaped. A hardy plant, it sprang up on the edge of cornfields and dotted the hills of Mexico’s dry Sierras. Around the end of the eighteenth century, Mexicans discovered its calming properties. And within a few decades it was a medicinal staple. In the countryside, many people just self-medicated, using recipes passed down from parents or grandparents.

But in the towns and cities, wholesalers like Del Moral usually sold the narcotic to herbolarias or traditional healers. These herbolarias were a common sight in nineteenth-century Mexico. Most were indigenous women. They sold their advice and their bewildering array of herbs, barks, and potions from mats strewn on the floor of the country’s hundreds of markets. Snooty health inspectors were not impressed.

“Their ignorance is enormous, they don’t know how to read or write, the Spanish they talk is very poor and the sicknesses and the herbs they know by their indigenous or vulgar names. Their business is mostly done on the outskirts of the markets on the edges of the pavement, setting up their wares on shabby blankets and separating them in vague overlapping piles. Their measures are handfuls and branches and their prices always extremely low.”

What they lacked in formal training, they made up for in price and choice. Their “shabby blankets” were piled with an A to Z of powders and leaves from achiote (seeds from the Bixa orellana shrub for measles) to zoapatle (Montanoa tomentosa for abortions).

Marijuana was one of their most versatile remedies. It was rolled up and smoked to cure asthma, bronchitis, and laryngitis; it was pounded into a powder, dissolved in alcohol, and rubbed on rheumatic joints, hernias, or the stomachs of women struggling to give birth; and its seeds were dissolved in water and used for urinary infections and bladder pains. Popular prescriptions included marijuana dissolved in water combined with jimson weed and butter to make “a calming pomade” and boiled in water to produce a rough form of hash and then mixed with cinnamon syrup. Tasty and relaxing.

If marijuana was most often employed as an herbal remedy, two groups also occasionally smoked it as a narcotic—soldiers and prisoners.

Most of the early references to marijuana concern soldiers. As early as 1846 as the Americans threatened to bombard the port of Veracruz, one worried newspaper reported that Mexican troops had been struck down “by a strange sickness.” “They are without strength, languid, confused and often end in a profound stupor.” The cause of this strange illness—“marijuana, which the soldiers smoke as if it was tobacco.” By the 1870s, the weed-addled soldier—stuck in his barracks or on the prowl looking for trouble—had been a stock character in the Mexican imagination. In fact, one of the most persuasive theories for the origins of the very word marijuana reflects this use. Juan was the name given to the average Mexican soldier. His camp wife was often termed María. María-Juan became Marijuana.

The second group that smoked marijuana was prisoners. They shared many of the soldiers’ experiences. They were locked indoors for long periods of time; they were bored; and they were looking for some form of escape. Again marijuana provided the answer. It was smuggled inside food, beneath women’s plaits and underclothes, or grown openly on the roof of prisons. In 1895, a journalist of the demimonde, Heriberto Frías, was jailed for exposing a vicious military campaign against peasant rebels. He described the poor men he met inside. They included a luckless thief who was busted every few months and returned to jail, where he would survive by selling marijuana cigarettes. And they included a wife beater who had been arrested for hitting his errant lover and who calmed his pain (if not hers) with the herb. “With marijuana he felt happy, the smoke of the cigarette bathed his brain, killed his memories, and submerged him in shadowy oriental ecstasy.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, then, marijuana consumption was minimal. It was relegated to a corner of the healers’ stalls. And it was contained in barracks and prisons. Places you might expect to find mentions, like criminology books, anthropology texts, and folk literature, barely mentioned the drug. The 600-page Diccionario de Mejicanismos [Dictionary of Mexican Slang] included only two words connected to weed—marihuano, or marijuana smoker; and grifo, or stoned. (In comparison, there were thirty-five colloquialisms for “drunk”).

So the roots of the panic lay not in the level of marijuana’s use. Del Moral’s warehouse—with its thousands of cigarettes and piles of weed—probably accounted for most of the capital’s sales. Rather, like the roots of most drug panics, they lay in the type of people that used it.

By the 1890s the ruling dictator Porfirio Díaz (in office most of the years 1876–1911) was trying to modernize Mexico. Foreign capital was flowing in. Railways and roads were being built. Entrepreneurs were reopening mines, extending sugar, cotton, and wheat plantations over peasant lands, and sending their goods north. Mexico was going places. And there was no room for an embarrassing lumpen proletariat of Indian healers, drunken soldiers, and stoned criminals. Marijuana— the medicine of the poor and the stimulant of the downtrodden— started to represent everything that was wrong with Mexico.

Doctors began the campaign. They argued that marijuana smoking produced hallucinations, temporary insanity, and, if smoked for long enough, full-blown dementia. They argued that mixed with booze or tobacco it could also cause outbursts of stunning violence. They also attacked the principal vendors of the drug—the herbolarias. “How many lives has your ignorance cost? How many pounds of marijuana have you sold? How many times have you given a poison rather than a cure?”

Because it was the late nineteenth century, they overlaid this intolerance with the vacuous veneer of race science. For Mexico’s elites, anyone indigenous (like most healers and soldiers) was at the bottom of the racial pyramid. Their habits and customs risked polluting the country’s population. So soldiers shouldn’t smoke it and healers shouldn’t sell it, not because it harmed them (who cared?), but because its cumulative use risked “degenerating the Mexican race.” Who better to blame for Mexico’s lack of progress than the dope-smoking, baby-bearing poor themselves?

If doctors started the myths, Mexico’s new tabloid press popularized them. From the 1890s onward, stories of prisoners, soldiers, and criminals attacking their fellow citizens under the influence of marijuana became widespread.

February 1894, Alberto Guttman robs a man and slices him with a machete. The cause—“the excitation that this powerful narcotic produces.” December 1899, former soldier Eulalio Andagua comes back to the barracks to visit friends, “turns into a madman after smoking marijuana,” attacks a guard, is placed in a holding cell and then tries to kill himself by beating his head against the wall. January 1901, Margarito Trujano punches a passerby, tears off his clothes, and gnaws at his arm before he is finally placed in a straitjacket. As the paper explained, “Trujano was not crazy . . . he was crazy under the influence of the marijuana which he smoked in large quantities.”

Though strict prohibitions against marijuana would come later, this first panic also caused a crackdown. Suppression started in the barracks, where sergeants threatened soldiers with court-martials. It moved into the prisons, where weed-smuggling visitors were caught and thrown inside with their relatives. Finally, by the turn of the century, it extended to the markets, where health inspectors now demanded a license for the sale of weed. And if you were poor, a woman, and without any letters after your name, your chances of getting one were basically nil. Inspectors scoured the stalls of the capital’s markets for the drug. If they found it, they busted the offending healer for dealing in harmful medicines. Then they moved on to the wholesalers like Del Moral.

No doubt the first marijuana panic was influential; it put hundreds behind bars; and it established the template for thinking about the drug for decades. Yet, initially at least, it was unable to hold up weed’s use. In the short term, tabloid alarm was little match for the forces of Revolution.

In 1910, after two decades of declining democracy, sliding wages, and aggressive land takeovers, Mexico’s masses rose up against the dictator. Within less than a year they drove him from power. On departing, Porfirio Díaz allegedly whispered that the revolutionaries “had unleashed a tiger. Let’s see if they can control it.” On this, at least, he was right. They couldn’t. And the conflict rolled on for another decade. Different armed groups stressed different aims. Some, like the followers of Emiliano Zapata wanted the return of stolen lands. Others, like the more middle-class followers of Venustiano Carranza, demanded political power. Others still, like the supporters of the charismatic former bandit Francisco “Pancho” Villa, coupled both calls with demands for higher wages.

In peak years—like 1914, when a right-wing general attempted to install a military regime—army numbers soared to around 250,000. Add to this the thousands of irregular rebel militias, local defense units, and robber bands and there were around double that number under arms at any one time. Some of these revolutionaries were rather puritanical. (Pancho Villa—whose face now adorns dozens of brands of tequila—was actually a teetotaler). Yet many were not. The Revolution proved a boon for the booze business. Domestic beers and cactus-based liquors like pulque, tequila, and mezcal soaked the nights, numbed the pain, and fueled the fireside songs of the Revolution’s soldiers.

But also, as soldiers left the barracks, so did marijuana. What had been a drug for the few became a solace for the many. Writings on the Revolution, from autobiographies to thinly veiled fictional accounts, point to the drug’s everyday use. Cannabis became campfire consolation. Perhaps the most famous account was in former soldier Francisco Urquizo’s tale of army life, Tropa Vieja. Urquizo described the military authorities desperately searching camp visitors for liquor and drugs. In a passage that would echo with any contemporary prison officer, their searches were in vain. Visitors hid firewater in the chorizo sausages, mezcal in their bras, their underskirts, and the nappies of newborns. They put black dye in the tequila to make it look like coffee and hid marijuana inside sandwiches and tortillas. Trumpeters hid the drug in their instruments. Soldiers secreted it in the linings of their jackets and in the barrels of their guns.

Inside camp the drug functioned as both medicine and narcotic. Camp wife Chata gives marijuana to one injured soldier to stop the pain. “Here’s a marijuana cigarette to suck on, let’s see if it can stop your agony and you can cope with the journey . . . he took a few puffs and was calmed.”

But it was also a drug for the downtimes. For the wannabe poet Jacobo Otamendi, it was blessed relief; alcohol was nothing in comparison.

“Liberating herb! Consolation of the overwhelmed, the sad and the afflicted. You . . . can make us forget the miseries of life, the pain of the body, and the malaise in our heart. You shake up the weight of time, you make us take flight and dream in what could be the supreme being. You are the consolation of the imprisoned, the music of the heart that sings a song for the free man, free of other men, free of the body, absolutely free.”

The poet’s paean was not a solitary one. The revolutionary corridos, or songs, that passed news from town to town also testified to marijuana’s extensive consumption. Most famously, revolutionary troops changed the lyrics of the popular ditty La Cucaracha [The Cockroach] to infer that the cockroach in question—the famously immoderate dictator Victoriano Huerta—“didn’t want to walk, because he lacks, because he lacks, marijuana to smoke.” But beyond the greatest hits, there were other mentions. In “Imprisoned they take me north,” the prisoner claimed that he was being dragged away “for my love of Juanita.” It wasn’t a girl; it was a slang term for marijuana.

But perhaps the most telling testament to the army’s drug use was the flood of stories about military marijuana smoking after the Revolution. Doctor’s accounts, medical theses, and judicial trials all pointed to the popularity of the narcotic. As late as 1938, a doctor asked battalion medics to fill in a questionnaire on camp marijuana use. No doubt harsh penalties had decreased smoking. But in some barracks— especially in weed-growing areas—the practice was still endemic.

In fact, this later study highlighted one of the key aspects of military marijuana. It was a balm and a way to relax. But it also had a practical use for battalion brass band players. The reason, one doctor explained, was simple. Weed dried the palate. So brass players smoked it to “lessen their secretion of saliva and hence play well.” Perhaps “the cockroach” of the corrido had no marijuana because the band playing the tune had smoked it all?

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Excerpted from The Dope. Copyright (c) 2021 by Benjamin T. Smith. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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