Coulee City dispatch. [volume] (Coulee City, Wash.) 19??-19??, 1937-05-27

WHO'S NEWS
THIS WEEK.,
By LemueI F. Parton

Gallant Crusader Against
the Marijuana Weed

Gallant Crusader Against
the Marijuana Weed
NEW YORK.-The good men
~ do isn't necessarily in
TERED with their bones if they
have cooperating wives. The
late Hamilton Wright's world
war on narcotics has been
showed on down through 10
years of tireless fighting by his
widow.
At Richmond, Va, recently, Mrs.
Wright pleaded to the National Con-
gress of Parents and Teachers for
united and effective action against
the marijuana weed, murderous
Mexican narcotic smoked by school
children. She calls it the "most
pernicious of drugs"
In New Mexico, twelve years ago,
the state narcotics commission
found growers and cigarette manu-
f%acturers pressing a campaign
among children, and they found the
children smoking marijuana. They
passed a law. The use of the weed
crept on to New York, Rhode Island,
Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Tex.
as and several southern states.
At the Richmond congress-. Mrs.
Wright represented the federal bu-
reau of narcotics. In 1921, she be-
gan her service as one of three in
ternational members of the opium
advisory committee of the League
of Nations, and has since waged her
fight against the drug traffic in ev-
cry country where it originates. She
was Elizabeth Washburn, the
daughter of the late Senator Will
liam Drew Washburn, who had been
minister to France.
Hamilton Wright travelled, agitat-
ed, organized, wrote and lectured
for years against narcotics. When,
in 1918, he went to Paris as a mem
Der of the peace conference, he was
killed in a street accident. Mrs.
Wright, highly placed socially in
Washington, left her pleasant home
and her four children and picked
up her husbands gage where it had
fallen.
In China, Turkey and Persia, she
fought against the world tide of poi
SON. She traced the green capsule
of the poppy, from the fields of Yum
a and Shensi provinces to the
slums and stews of world capitals.
She rounded up the story of the for
eign a waged against China to
make her admit Indian opium. With
Ellen La Motto, who wrote '"The
Backwash of War;" she pieced to-
gether a narrative as unlovely as
any chaplet of horror which ever
rested on the brow of the nations.
There are so many things to be
against these days, it is hard to
pick your opponent. Why not just
take marijuana weed? This writer
speaks with feeling on this subject,
having observed n citizen chew
ing another's ear off in a mountain
hamlet in southern Mexico, quite a
few years before the weed became
an extra-curricular interest in
American high schools.
I had joined in singing the quaint
"La Cucaracha" song about the
cockroach that got so full of mari
juana weed that he couldn't walk
home. There was nothing in the
song about the drugs peculiar in
citement to mayhem. The song will
become d~istasteful to anyone who
has seen marijuana at work-also
my experience near Mazatlan,
where a peon was shooting up the
town and lunging at ~passersby with
a machete.
1t was about eleven years ago
that the Brooklyn police arrested
Andrew Huerta, a Mexican sailor,
who was selling m%arijuana ciga-
rettes. In a backyard in Queens, he
showed them a knee-high crop of
marijuana. This led to the arrest
of racketeers, growing the weed and
selling cigarettes to soldiers.
Every year or so there is an ar
rest. The cigarettes are made
from the dried leaves and the flow
r of the weed, which is known as
wild tobacco" and looks like a to-
mato vine. 1t is a tough growth
and so is the habit. If somebody
on the subways bites you, you will
know what is the matter.
All states, as Mrs. Wright reports,
have laws against it's growth or use,
except South Carolina, Kentucky and
Tennessee. But, so far as this writ
err can learn, there has been no
unified or vigorous action, there is
meager information and there is &C.
cumulating evidence that, with re-
peal, some of the more resourceful
liquor racketeers became agricul
turiSts.
Lost Atlantis Again.
For more than thirty years Pro-
fessor Leo Frobenius has been talk
ing the shine off our modern civili-
cation by demonstrating that a lot