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Chapter 3 Old Time Radio Programs |
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THE VOICES OF EVIL
Who was the Rev. E.J. Rollings ?
Who was E.J. Rollings
E.J. Rollings was the author of at least two well know Reefer Madness pamphlets, "Marihuana the Weed of Wow" and "The Silent Horror," part of which reads as following:
" An eighteen-year-old boy in a Midwestern city smoked two "reefers" and an hour later choked his sweetheart to death because she refused his shocking, lustful advances, born in a marijuana-crazed brain. He later testified that he loved her and had intended to marry her and when normal would never have dreamed of an improper suggestion, let alone the horrible murder. A sixteen-year-old boy shot his mother and father to death with his father's shotgun after smoking several "Mary Anns" given to him by a new friend whose acquaintance he made by chance. He could neither explain nor remember the killing when the effects of the drug had worn off and sobbed himself into hysterical grief when told of his crime. And so, on and on, runs the record of thievery, forgery, banditry, kidnapping, brutal murder, degeneracy, and rape, all chargeable to this paralyzer of conscience and inflamer of depravity --- Marijuana! "
Defender Publishers - Wichita, Kansas
Marijuana - The Dutchess of Despair
Unlike Opium, Coca Leaves and other habit-forming drugs, it requires no refining process to prepare it for consumption. When picked and dried, the leaves or the flowering top of the plant are ready to be rolled into cigarettes and sold to American youth at ten to twenty-five cents each on the bootleg market.
Someone his well said, "Most bad things are good things abused", and Marijuana is no exception to this rule. From the fibre of the Canabis Sativa the very finest rope and twine is made. The long, soft, strand, and very expensive rope used by hangmen is made from the Indian Hemp or Marijuana plant. Hats, paper and textiles from the stalk, drying oil for use in paints, soaps and linoleum from the seeds, livestock feed and fertilizer from the residue of the seed after the oil has been extracted, and resin for pharmaceutical preparations made it a profitable ten thousand acre commercial crop in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, and Minnesota.
But depraved man is never satisfied to "use" the product of the universe but finds more gratification in "mis-use", and as early as 1090 A.D. in Persia we find a sect of men appropriating hemp leaves or Hashish and under its satanic persuasion committing such dastardly acts of murder and cruelty that they were known as "The Order of Assassins". Today in America we are confronted with the fruits of this depravity [ see picture on page 24 ] in the form of a habit-forming, drugged cigarette made from the leaves and blossoms of that same plant, but now called "Marijuana", which transforms bright-eyed, ruddy-faced American boys and girls into irresponsible, immoral degenerates, brutal criminals and finally into babbling imbecile,
This Duchess of Despair spins colorful names for her nefarious messengers of insanity, immorality and crime, "reefers", "muggles", "smuggies", and "Mary Anns" and outwitting King Opium and her other competitors of the dope industry, she rolls her insidious, double-distilled essence of damnation in cigarette form! Boys and girls who would shrink from the morphine needle and find neither opportunity nor necessary funds to smoke opium, can easily, be persuaded to try a new cigarette with a "lift", and a "kick", costing only ten to twenty-five cents.
Law enforcement officers, judges, and other officials have been stunned by the unprecedented wild-fire spread of Marijuana smoking. To fix the extent of addiction at this time is impossible, but some estimate of the illicit traffic in marijuana may be made from the fact that Federal Narcotic agents with the aid of city, county, and state officers destroyed sixteen hundred tons of the weed in July, August, September and October of 1938.
One pound of marijuana will make approximately 1,500 cigarettes . . . 1,600 tons would make over 4,500,000,000 individual cigarettes . . . 225,000,000 packages, or enough to supply every citizen of the United States, men, women and children, with two packages of these deadly marijuana cigarettes. Certainly it is unreasonable to suppose that these law enforcement agencies destroyed more than half the available bootleg supply, in fact, narcotic enforcement men figure that they never confiscate more than one-tenth of the actual bootleg supply of any narcotic drug, that nine-tenths escapes them and reaches the market and is consumed by addicts. But granting that in this case they confiscated fifty per cent, leaving a similar quantity on the market. If we have a million marijuana smokers in the United States they would have to smoke 13 cigarettes a day or practically a cigarette per hour for every hour they were awake for three hundred and sixty-five days to consume that quantity. This extent of indulgence would not be possible, therefore, we are most conservative when we say that there are over a million slaves of the "reefer" in our country today, perhaps nearer two million!
May I press further to try to emphasize the tragedy these four and a half billion cigarettes, loaded with a triple extract of hell, each a potential instigator of suicide and death. Its action on the individual is unpredictable. At first it may just make him happy and stimulate his desires, and again the first cigarette may distort his brain, turn wrong to right, set passions on fire, rob him of all sense of proportion, and time, and space, and make him a potential killer.
An eighteen-year-old boy in a Midwestern city smoked two "reefers" and an hour later choked his sweetheart to death because she refused his shocking, lustful advances, born in a marijuana-crazed brain. He later testified that he loved her and had intended to marry her and when normal would never have dreamed of an improper suggestion, let alone the horrible murder.
A sixteen-year-old boy shot his mother and father to death with his father's shotgun after smoking several "Mary Anns" given to him by a new friend whose acquaintance he made by chance. He could neither explain nor remember the killing when the effects of the drug had worn off and sobbed himself into hysterical grief when told of his crime. And so, on and on, runs the record of thievery, forgery, banditry, kidnapping, brutal murder, degeneracy, and rape, all chargeable to this paralyzer of conscience and inflamer of depravity --- Marijuana!
Forty-eight states have passed legislation aimed to stamp out this menace and a supporting or coordinating enactment was passed in 1937 by the Congress of the United States bringing this dangerous drug under Federal control. The law enforcement machinery of the cities, counties, states and nation, are shouldering their responsibility---have you shouldered yours?
You are your brother's keeper, and the keeper of his children; and whether you like to face it or not, the responsibility is still there. There is always safely in knowledge, never in ignorance. Learn what the Marijuana plant looks like, then watch for it, and report anything that even resembles it to the nearest police department or sheriff's office. Warn the boys and girls in your home, school and Sunday School, sponsor lectures and discussions on the subject and thereby do your part.
Hear the voice of Wm. G. WALKER:
DOWNLOAD THE VOICE OF E.J. Rollings
Sound Clip taken from the OTR program:
"The Fighting Parson" - First Aired - (??)
E.J. Rollings - 686 KBbyte
[To download - Right Click - choose "Save Target As"]
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