Democratic Sentinel, Volume 21, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 December 1897 — A Seductive Weed. [ARTICLE]

A Seductive Weed.

In Southern Arizona the jail and prison officials have their hands full in trying to prevent the smuggling into their institutions of the seductive mariguana. This is a kind of “loco” weed, more powerful than opium. It grows from seed by cultivation in Southern Arizona and in Mexico. It is a dangerous thing for the uninitiated to handle, but those who know its uses say It produces more ravishing dream's than opium. The Mexicans mix it with tobacco and smoke it in cigarettes, inhaling the smoke. When used in this way it produces a hilarious spirit in the smoker that cannot be equaled in any other form of dissipation. When smuggled Inside the prison walls its devotees readily pay $4 an ounce for it, but free men buy it on the outside for 50 cents an ounce. General Shriver, of the prison force at Yuma, has just unearthed a large quantity of the weed that had been cached ' within reach of the convicts who work in the ouside gangs.—St. Louis Globe-Demo-crat.