Reefer Madness

A 1936 American exploitation film originally released under the title Tell Your Children, directed by silent-era veteran Louis J. Gasnier and produced by George Hirliman. Financed by a church group as a cautionary morality tale, it depicts wholesome high-school students who, after being lured into smoking cannabis, descend into hallucinations, manslaughter, attempted rape, suicide, and insanity. Exploitation distributor Dwain Esper later purchased the film, recut it with more salacious footage, and toured it through grindhouse circuits under shifting regional titles — Dope Addict, Doped Youth, The Burning Question, Love Madness — with the New England title Reefer Madness ultimately sticking. Because neither Esper nor Hirliman secured a valid copyright, the film lapsed into the public domain. In 1971–1972, Keith Stroup, founder of NORML, located a print in the Library of Congress and purchased it for $297, screening it on college campuses as unintentional comedy and using ticket proceeds to fund legalization lobbying. Its rediscovery transformed it from earnest propaganda into a camp cult artifact emblematic of Depression-era cannabis hysteria and of the racial and xenophobic anxieties that accompanied early federal prohibition.