In 1938, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia requests that the New York Academy of Medicine conduct an investigation of marijuana. The 1944 report, titled “The Marihuana Problem in the City of New York,” but commonly referred to as the “LaGuardia Report,” concludes that many claims about the dangers of marijuana are exaggerated or untrue.
“The practice of smoking marihuana does not lead to addiction in the medical sense of the word… The use of marihuana does not lead to morphine or heroin or cocaine addiction and no effort is made to create a market for these narcotics by stimulating the practice of marihuana smoking… Marihuana is not the determining factor in the commission of major crimes… The publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York City is unfounded.”