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Show I WHO'S NEWS I THIS WEEK... By Lemuel F. Pa Hon Gallant Crusader Against the Marijuana Weed NEW YORK. The good men do isn't necessarily interred with their bones if they have co-operating wives. The late Hamilton Wright's world war on narcotics has been shoved on down through 19 years of tireless fighting by his widow. At Richmond, Va., recently, Mrs. Wright pleaded to the National Congress 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 manufacturers manu-facturers pressing s campaign among children, and they found the children smoking marijuana. They passed s law. The use of the weed crept on to New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Texas Tex-as and several southern states. At the Richmond congress, Mrs. Wright represented the federal bureau bu-reau of narcotics. In 1921, she began be-gan her service as one of three International In-ternational members of the opium advisory committee of the League of Nations, and has since waged her flght'against the drug traffic in every ev-ery country where it originates. She was Elizabeth Washburn, the daughter of the late Senator William Wil-liam Drew Washburn, who had been minister to France. Hamilton Wright traveled, agitated, agitat-ed, organized, wrote and lectured for years against narcotics. When, in 1918, he went to Paris as a mem-: mem-: ber of the peace conference, he was I killed In a street accident Mrs. Wright highly placed socially in i Washington, left her pleasant home and her four children and picked up her husband's gage where it had fallen. I In China, Turkey and Persia, she fought against the world tide of poison. poi-son. She traced the green capsule of the poppy, from the fields of Yunnan Yun-nan and Shensi provinces to the slums and stews of world capitals. She rounded up the story of the foreign for-eign wars waged against China to make her admit Indian opium. With Ellen La Motte, who wrote "The Backwash of War," she pieced together 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 one citizen chewing 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 marijuana mari-juana weed that he couldn't walk home. There was nothing in the song about the drug's peculiar incitement in-citement to mayhem. The song will become distasteful to anyone who has seen mariiuana 'at work also my experience near Mazatlan, where a peon was shooting up the town and lunging at passersby with a machete. It was about eleven years ago that the Brooklyn police arrested Andrew Iluerta, a Mexican sailor, who was selling marijuana cigarettes. ciga-rettes. In a backyard In Queens, he showed them a knee-high crop of marijuana. This led to the arrest Of racketeer, rrnvinr Hia uronfl J selling cigarettes to soldiers. Every year or so there is an arrest ar-rest The cigarettes are made from the dried leaves and the flowers flow-ers of the weedwhich is known as "wild tobacco" and looks like a tomato to-mato vine. It is a tough growth ana so is tne naoit. II somebody bites you on the subway, you will know what is the matter. All states, as Mrs. Wright reports, have laws against its growth or use, except South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. But so far as this writer writ-er can learn, there has been no unified or vigorous action, there is meager information and there is accumulating ac-cumulating evidence that with repeal, re-peal, some of the more resourceful liquor racketeers became agriculturists. Lost Atlantis Again. For more than thirty years, Professor Pro-fessor Leo Frobenius has been taking tak-ing the shine off our modern civilization civili-zation by demonstrating that a lot of it is old stuff. The famous German Ger-man archaeologist, lecturing in the United States, is one of the leading defenders of the lost continent of Atlantis theory. Now sixty-four years old, he delves tirelessly in India, In-dia, Africa, Egypt, Tripoli and Turkey. Tur-key. The son of a German army officer, also an author and scholar, he made his first expedition in 1904. Of all savants, he has turned up the most convincing evidence that many strata of great buried civilizations civili-zations underly our house of life. Consolldnted News Feature! WNU Service. |