Question about Marijuana History

[420hydro]

It seems like I read it somewhere that the term "marihuana" was Mexican slang for "loco weed".

My question is "Was Hearst, the newspaper magnate, the first to use the term 'marihuana' to vilify cannabis in this country?"

Any documentation will be helpful...

(p.s. I loaned my "The Emperor Wears No Clothes" book to somebody and can't get it back...)

 

[Rin101]

I believe so, the full Emperor text is online and here's the chapter you're looking for:
Jack Herer - Chapter 4

Scroll down to the section entitled "Hearst, His Hatred & Hysterical Lies"

I will quote a few excerpts here for anyone interested, but not interested enough to read through the wall of text

But other forces were at work. The war fury that led to the Spanish American War in 1898 was ignited by William Randolph Hearst through his nationwide chain of newspapers, and marked the beginning of “yellow journalism”* as a force in American politics.

*Webster’s Dictionary defines “yellow journalism” as the use of cheaply sensational or unscrupulous methods in newspapers and other media to attract or influence the readers.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, Hearst’s newspapers deliberately manufactured a new threat to America and a new yellow journalism campaign to have hemp outlawed. For example, a story of a car accident in which a “marijuana cigarette” was found would dominate the headlines for weeks, while alcohol-related car accidents (which outnumbered marijuana-connected accidents by more than 10,000 to 1) made only the back pages.

Starting with the 1898 Spanish American War, the Hearst newspaper had denounced Spaniards, Mexican-Americans and Latinos.
After the seizure of 800,000 acres of Hearst’s prime Mexican timberland by the “marihuana” smoking army of Pancho Villa,* these slurs intensified.

Non-stop for the next three decades, Hearst painted a picture of the lazy, pot-smoking Mexican, still one of our most insidious prejudices. Simultaneously, he waged a similar racist smear campaign against the Chinese, referring to them as the “Yellow Peril.”

From 1910 to 1920, Hearst’s newspapers would claim that the majority of incidents in which blacks were said to have raped white women, could be traced directly to c*****e. This continued for 10 years until Hearst decided it was not “c*****e-crazed negroes” raping white women - it was now “marijuana-crazed negroes” raping white women.

Terrible stuff here

 

[chancedebris]

and the newspapers and mass media have never stopped selling bullshit wars to the American people. The N.Y.Times never found a war they did not like.