No, this is not another thread on the MMM, i.e. Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Neither, is it a thread on Mormons and Medical Marijuana. That's been taken care of by the dude on the (in)famous, but now defunct, FAIR(?) board. Which by the way, was a very fascinating thread in and of itself. I was quite surprised by the responses there and I highly recommend that thread for some enjoyable and enlightening reading.
No, this is the Mormons, Mexico and Marijuana thread.
In my research, I came across, some time ago, the following explaining the reason why Utah became the first state to make marijuana illegal, some twenty or so years before the federal act.
Damn those polygamists. You send them across the border and what happens next? They all start assimilating into the local culture and what do they bring back to Utah when they return? You guessed it, marijuana.
I have some questions after you read the following:
...Well, from state to state, on the theory that this newly encountered drug marijuana would be substituted by the hard narcotics addicts or by the alcohol drinkers for their previous drug that had been prohibited, state to state this fear of substitution carried, and that accounted for 26 of the 27 states -- that is, either the anti-Mexican sentiment in the Southwest and Rocky Mountain areas or fear of substitution in the Northeast. That accounted for 26 of the 27 states, and there was only one state left over. It was the most important state for us because it was the first state ever to enact a criminal law against the use of marijuana and it was the state of Utah.
Now, if you have been hearing this story and you have been playing along with me, you think "Oh, wait a minute, Whitebread, Utah fits exactly with Colorado, Montana, -- it must have been the Mexicans."
Well, that's what I thought at first. But we went and did a careful study of the actual immigration pattern and found, to our surprise, that Utah didn't have then, and doesn't have now, a really substantial Mexican-American population. So it had to be something else.
Come on folks, if it had to be something else, what do you think it might have been? Are you thinking what I was thinking -- that it must have had something to do with the single thing which makes Utah unique in American history -- its association with the Mormon church.
With help from some people in Salt Lake City, associated with the Mormon Church and the Mormon National Tabernacle in Washington -- with their help and a lot of work we found out what the genesis was of the first marihuana law in this country. Yes, it was directly connected to the history of Utah and Mormonism and it went like this.
I think that a lot of you know that, in its earliest days, the Mormon church permitted its male members to have more than one wife -- polygamy. Do you all know that in 1876, in a case called Reynolds against the United States, the United States Supreme Court said that Mormons were free to believe what they wanted, but they were not free to practice polygamy in this country. Well, who do you think enforced that ruling of the Supreme Court in 1876? At the end of the line, who enforces all rulings of the Supreme Court? Answer: the state and local police. And who were they in Utah then? All Mormons, and so nothing happened for many years. Those who wanted to live polygamously continued to do so.
In 1910, the Mormon Church in synod in Salt Lake City decreed polygamy to be a religious mistake and it was banned as a matter of the Mormon religion. Once that happened, there was a crackdown on people who wanted to live in what they called "the traditional way". So, just after 1910, a fairly large number of Mormons left the state of Utah, and indeed left the United States altogether and moved into northwest Mexico. They wrote a lot about what they wanted to accomplish in Mexico. They wanted to set up communities where they were basically going to convert the Indians, the Mexicans, and what they referred to as "the heathen" in the neighborhood to Mormonism.
By 1914, they had had very little luck with the heathen, but our research shows now beyond question that the heathen had a little luck with them. What happened apparently -- now some of you who may be members of the church, you know that there are still substantial Mormon communities in northwest Mexico -- was that, by and large most of the Mormons were not happy there, the religion had not done well there, they didn't feel comfortable there, they wanted to go back to Utah where there friends were and after 1914 did.
And with them, the Indians had given them marijuana. Now once you get somebody back in Utah with the marijuana it all becomes very easy, doesn't it? You know that the Mormon Church has always been opposed to the use of euphoriants of any kind. So, somebody saw them with the marijuana, and in August of 1915 the Church, meeting again in synod in Salt Lake City decreed the use of marijuana contrary to the Mormon religion and then -- and this is how things were in Utah in those days -- in October of 1915, the state legislature met and enacted every religious prohibition as a criminal law and we had the first criminal law in this country's history against the use of marijuana...
So, does anyone know where one would find references to Mormon leaders telling its members to give up the wacky weed? I would be very much interested, if someone could assist me in that.
Also, because of the truly enlightening and humorous posts we have been enjoying lately, feel free to imagine what the conversations might have been like when leaders went to visit across the border and found the saints sitting around the campfire banging drums, eating molasses cookies or whatever and engaging in wild orgies with the locals.
Of course, if anyone has actual journal entries from ancestors who were participating in these kind of drum sessions or other alternative enlightenment sessions, feel free to add those here, as well.