How a hoax from 1971 is still claiming victims
On August 23, 1971, Surgeon General of the United States Jesse Steinfeld testified before the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse. This special task force was formed by President Nixon to evaluate drug laws and make recommendations. Steinfeld came prepared to speak about how the punishment for marijuana possession was often far worse than the infraction, but it was something else he said that day that made headlines.
Reading from his notes, Steinfeld told the Commission, “Indeed, Dr. Burke, president of the American Historical Reference Society and consultant to the Smithsonian, reports that no less than seven U.S. presidents smoked marijuana, including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Taylor, and Pierce.”
No one in the hearing room questioned the Surgeon General about this fact, but they should have. Because there was no Dr. Burke, and there was no American Historical Reference Society.
Steinfeld was the victim of a hoax that is still claiming unsuspecting victims today.
In our premier episode of Season 6 (a season focused on some of the biggest and weirdest myths in presidential history), Jess and I dig into the roots of this hoax and some spurious quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
Listen to the full episode now:
Surgeon General Jesse Steinfeld
When it was revealed that Dr. Burke and his society were completely fabricated, Steinfeld’s team attributed the error to a researcher who sourced the story from multiple newspapers. They traced it back to an undergrounds newspaper out of Chicago called The Seed.
from Fort Lauderdale News, Fort Lauderdale, FL, October 21, 1971
Here’s the version that ran in The Seed:
from The Seed, Chicago, June 30, 1971
I found the story (minus the ending flourish about Nixon “shooting up”) printed a few weeks earlier in June 1971 in the Minnesota underground newspaper Hundred Flowers. Could this be where it all started?
The editor of Hundred Flowers, Ed Felien, is still working in the industry as the editor Minneapolis’s Southside Pride so of course I reached out to ask about the presidents and pot. Felien got back to me after checking in with his old colleagues, and Hundred Flowers was unfortunately not the source of the story. And they were not willingly participating in any kind of hoax, as they believed Dr. Burke was real and credible. In fact, Felien’s response pointed out, Dr. Burke may actually be real. Or at least, there was a Dr. Burke who worked at the National Archives at the time, but he was not a consultant with The Smithsonian Institute or a pontificator on pot and the presidents.
As The Seed and Hundred Flowers were part of the Underground Press Syndicate, a network of 271 underground papers in 1971 that freely printed material from each other, there may be no telling where the story was first printed. In fact, the story of America’s founders may not even be American-born, according to a writer for the Ann Arbor Sun. In March 1972, Mike Aldrich covered the hoax and said he remembered first seeing the story a couple years earlier in the Canadian tabloid magazine Midnight.
Midnight later became Globe and was bought by the same company that makes the National Enquirer—not exactly bastions of journalistic integrity. That said, if any collector of old Midnight tabloid papers happens to find a version of this story from 1969 – 1971, please let me know! I’d love to nail down the origin once and for all.
Not everyone got the memo that Dr. Burke’s presidential history was fully imagined. As recently as 2022, a new one-volume encyclopedia Marijuana in America: Cultural, Political, and Medical Controversies repeated most of his claims.
2022 scholarly tome on marijuana
In a chapter titled American Presidents, PhD student A. Burroughs cited author Robert Deitch as the source of these facts.
from Marijuana in America: Cultural, Political, and Medical Controversies
Burroughs, who told me she wrote this piece in her first semester of graduate school when she had not yet developed the research skillset she has now, used Dietch’s 2003 Hemp – American History Revisited: The Plant with a Divided History as a source.
Deitch may have passed on bad information, but I love that he provided a very detailed footnote. He cites Chris Conrad’s 1993 book Hemp, Lifeline to the Future as the source—detailing that Conrad was quoting a June 21, 1975 article from Green Egg Magazine called “Pot and Presidents.”
Beautiful footnote from Robert Deitch’s 2003 book Hemp – American History Revisited: The Plant with a Divided History
The fictional Dr. Burke may have lost an “e” from his name in the neopagan Green Egg Magazine, but he hasn’t lost his edge. His story that duped a Surgeon General in 1975 was is still fooling people more than 50 years later.
Listen to the full episode now:
Sources for the Podcast:
“Some of my finest hours have been spent on my back veranda smoking hemp,” Monticello.org
“George Washington Grew Hemp,” MountVernon.org
Cyclopaedia, Or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Volume 1, by Ephraïm Chambers
