The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) figures in The Bob Zadek Show as an example of a mainstream medical publication whose early-20th-century editorial content reflected the racial hysteria surrounding drug regulation in the United States. In two episodes, host Bob Zadek cites a JAMA editorial on cocaine use among Black Southerners as evidence that the first narcotics prohibitions were not born of science or public-health concern. The journal is treated less as a medical institution than as a documentary trace of the environment in which drug prohibition was enacted.
The 2009 episode: JAMA as evidence of racial hysteria
In the April 12, 2009 episode on marijuana legalization in California, Bob Zadek introduced the history of drug regulation by describing it as having “a profound anti-black bias.” He told his guest, lobbyist John Lovell, that for most of the country’s history drug use went unregulated, and that regulation began only with “hysteria and a fear of drug-crazed blacks” around 1913. Legalizing Pot in California (2009)
Zadek then turned to JAMA directly, framing it as an institution one would expect to be measured rather than alarmist. He said that “you would think they’re not too hysterical, they’re pretty objective,” and quoted a line from a JAMA editorial: “Negroes in the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice, that of cocaine sniffing.” He presented the quotation as evidence that even a mainstream medical journal participated in the racial framing of drug use. Legalizing Pot in California (2009)
According to Zadek’s account in the same episode, newspapers then picked up the theme, claiming that cocaine use caused Black men to rape white women and improved their pistol marksmanship. He also described a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Washington that found, in his quotation, “If the Chinaman cannot get along without his dope, we can get along without him,” and congressional hearings in which fear was expressed of “drug-crazed, sex-mad Negroes” and of “degenerate Mexicans” smoking marijuana and “Chinamen” seducing white women with drugs. He cited a New York Times editorial headline reading “Negro Cocaine Fiends Are New Southern Menace. Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower-Class Blacks.” Legalizing Pot in California (2009)
Zadek’s conclusion in the 2009 episode was that the first narcotics prohibition legislation was passed in that environment, “nothing born of science,” with freedom taking “a back seat to race hysteria and bad science.” He tied that history to the contemporary federal prohibition of cocaine and marijuana. Legalizing Pot in California (2009)
Guest John Lovell agreed that much public policy of the period was racially motivated, and named Woodrow Wilson as “an unvarnished racist” who dismissed African Americans from federal work. Lovell then shifted to the modern debate, citing Proposition 5, which he said would have decriminalized all drugs and appeared on the 2008 ballot, and its opposition by the Interfaith Based Council and LULAC. He argued that opponents of legalization today are concerned with “the misery index in the inner city.” Legalizing Pot in California (2009)
The 2016 episode: JAMA in the political-origins account
In the July 16, 2016 episode with Dr. Rick Doblin of MAPS, Zadek returned to the same JAMA editorial, this time as part of a longer account of prohibition’s political origins. He described the early 20th century as a period when “racism was really pretty ugly” and when mainstream institutions drew a connection between what he called, using the era’s offensive term, “Negro behavior and drug use.” He again identified JAMA as “pretty mainstream publication I would say,” and quoted the same line: “Negroes in the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice, that of cocaine sniffing.” Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
In the 2016 telling, Zadek added that some newspapers, including mainstream ones, claimed that cocaine use caused Black men to rape white women more, and that it enhanced their accuracy with a pistol. He repeated the blue-ribbon panel quotation about “the Chinaman” and his dope, and closed with the New York Times headline about “Negro cocaine fiends” as a “new Southern menace.” His summary was that drugs have “this ugly history regulation,” none of it related to drugs as drugs or to whether drugs are inherently dangerous. Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
The 2016 episode placed the JAMA quotation within a broader chronology. Doblin described marijuana’s criminalization in 1937 through a tax act and its removal from the pharmacopoeia in 1942, attributing both in part to Harry Anslinger and prohibition agents who, a few years after the end of alcohol prohibition, were looking for something else to criminalize. Doblin said the targets were mostly Mexicans using marijuana and Black jazz musicians. Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
Doblin also described the American Medical Association as having argued against criminalization in Congress, saying it pointed to medical uses, called the evidence of abuse massively exaggerated, and was completely ignored. That detail places the AMA, JAMA’s parent body, on the opposite side of the legislative fight from the racial framing Zadek attributes to the JAMA editorial. Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
Doblin further described the Nixon administration’s drug policy as a political strategy. He recounted a quotation attributed to Ehrlichman stating that Nixon was upset about Black civil rights activists and hippies, and that since he could not criminalize their ideas, he could selectively criminalize the drugs they used—opiates, cocaine, and marijuana—exaggerate the risks, and use criminal penalties to break up the groups and arrest their leaders. Zadek agreed, saying Nixon “hated the hippies” and “really wasn’t very fond of the blacks,” and declared a War on Drugs to “lock up hippies and blacks.” Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
Doblin also said Nixon commissioned the Shafer Commission to study marijuana, expecting to rig the system, but the commission found marijuana less dangerous than claimed and recommended that penalties not be worse than the drugs themselves; Nixon ignored it. He described felony disenfranchisement as a further consequence, citing Florida’s sending of notices to about 80,000 people before the Bush–Gore election, mostly Black voters, and referenced The New Jim Crow. Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
Across episodes: the same quotation, a wider frame
Both episodes quote the same JAMA editorial line about “Negroes in the South” and cocaine sniffing, and both use it to argue that drug prohibition had a racial rather than medical origin. The 2009 treatment is narrower: Zadek deploys JAMA as a single exhibit in a litany of racist drug imagery, and the surrounding debate is about marijuana legalization in California and the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. The 2016 treatment embeds the same quotation in a fuller political history, adding the 1937 tax act, the 1942 removal from the pharmacopoeia, Anslinger, the AMA’s ignored congressional testimony, the Ehrlichman quotation, the Shafer Commission, and felony disenfranchisement. The later episode thus advances the argument further, with Doblin supplying the institutional and political detail that the 2009 episode did not. Legalizing Pot in California (2009) Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state JAMA’s founding date, its editorial procedures, or the identity of the editorial’s author. They do not give the full text of the JAMA editorial beyond the single quoted line, nor do they say whether the journal later repudiated it. The excerpts also do not state the name of the 1937 tax act beyond Doblin’s reference to “the Tax Act,” nor the name of the blue-ribbon panel, nor the date or outcome of the Harrison Act beyond Zadek’s and Lovell’s disagreement over whether it was 1913 or earlier.