Now that recreational marijuana is legal in California, it’s easy to forget that cannabis was once regarded as a dangerous, even demonic, substance that led users to chop up their families with axes, disembowel themselves and engage in other actions more harmful to society than giggling at old movies or forgetting what you were about to say.
A particularly noteworthy example of this reefer madness was a criminal case that took place in San Francisco in 1940. As pre-Summer of Love serendipity would have it, the supposed villain was a guitar teacher.
On March 26, 1940, The Chronicle ran a story on Page 3 under the arresting headline, “Two daughters accuse guitar instructor of giving marijuana to their mother.” From the opening sentence, it appeared that the paper had determined that the accusation was true and the trial would be a mere formality.
“From the witness stand in Police Court yesterday, two pretty daughters revealed how they turned detectives to trace the source of their mother’s secret, almost hypnotic subjugation to marijuana,” read the lead paragraph of the piece, which was accompanied by a large photograph of the two daughters, one of them smiling vivaciously. “What they discovered brought pale John Picadura, 33, a guitar instructor, before Municipal Judge Dunn on two felony charges, of possession and planting the vicious weed.”
But possessing and growing the vicious weed was not the worst of the charges faced by the suspiciously pale Picadura. The mother of the two pretty daughters, 45-year-old Marie de Lisle, accused him of raping her after incapacitating her by blowing marijuana smoke into her mouth.
This alleged crime was ferreted out by de Lisle’s daughters, 22-year-old Norma Wiesner and Margaret Kulp, 19, who the paper informed us “became amateur sleuths and star witnesses” to protect their mother.
“In their testimony, the girls said that last fall they noticed their mother ‘visibly fading,’” The Chronicle reported. “Mystified and alarmed — Mrs. de Lisle appeared otherwise well — they finally took her to San Francisco Hospital shortly before Christmas.”
The doctors were initially baffled as well. But according to the daughters, after studying the case they became convinced that de Lisle had been the victim of some kind of “narcotic addiction — possibly of marijuana.”
The intrepid daughters now sprang into action. They remembered seeing an exhibition about marijuana at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, and paid a visit to the State Narcotic Bureau headquarters in San Francisco to study the weed again. Saying they suspected Picadura of drugging their mother, they invaded his room — which, conveniently, was located in their mother’s house at 1106 Eddy St.
女孩告诉邓恩,他们和他们的姑姑found potted marijuana plants in the room, “dried weeds and a mixture for cigarettes in a drawer.” They summoned a narcotics agent, who arrested Picadura. The guitar teacher was charged with rape and violating the state poison act and ordered to stand trial.
During the three-day jury trial in August, de Lisle testified that when Picadura was giving her a guitar lesson, he suddenly grabbed her and blew marijuana smoke into her mouth. “I immediately became dazed and numb and did not know what was happening until I awoke on the sofa,” she said. “I asked him why he had done it and he said it was because he loved me and would never leave me.”
She testified that he later forced her to smoke marijuana cigarettes, raping her again when she was in the trance-like state induced by the drug. She also testified that Picadura had threatened to kill her if she told her husband. Asked why she hadn’t told anyone, she replied, “I feared it would disgrace my family and defame my character.”
When called to the stand, Picadura told a somewhat different story. He said he had never seen marijuana before he was arrested. He testified that he had offered to give de Lisle lessons at his Mason Street studio for $2, but she offered him $3 to come to her house. She told him, “Take me to some night clubs — I want to hear the music,” and he said she frequently paid for them to go out to bars and clubs. She insisted that he move into her house, and “each time they had a lesson provided a pint of liquor or more.”
“She told me she was a free agent, and had been separated from her husband for 15 years,” Picadura testified, “and she told me she’d never enjoyed life before, on account of her children and such things.”
Picadura told the court that although he and de Lisle had never done anything improper at her home, he had taken her to a hotel on Sixth Street several times.
“Finally, I realized there was going to be trouble,” the guitar teacher said. “She told me she would kill herself, and actually tried to once.”
A barber summoned as a character witness for Picadura, Marie Baracco, testified that she had seen de Lisle going into Sixth Street bars and hotels, wearing dark glasses, and that de Lisle had once flown into a jealous rage “because I parted his hair.”
De Lisle’s husband, Walter, a machinist, testified that he had seen Picadura with his arm around his wife, but “I kept away from him.”
The defense also called an expert witness, a physician who testified that marijuana would not make a person unconscious unless consumed in large quantities and that it was not habit-forming.
De Lisle also admitted buying clothes for Picadura, but said, “I was under the influence of dope.”
In his closing argument, Picadura’s attorney told the jury that the affair between his client and de Lisle was “condoned” by her husband, that she had “bought” his affections and that the de Lisle family had “plotted” to rid themselves of Picadura. “My client is not lily white,” boomed the attorney, “but who is?”
Who indeed. It took the jury just 20 minutes to acquit Picadura.
The Chronicle, whose attitude toward the case had shifted noticeably during the course of the “almost fantastic” trial, reported that after hearing the verdict, “the prettiest tune he ever heard in his life,” the “unfortunate and misunderstood young man” wept.
“His accuser, Mrs. Marie De Lisle, wasn’t so happy, but she managed to control herself.”
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email:metro@sfchronicle.com
Trivia time
Previous trivia question:Who is fourth in NBA history in average points per game, behind Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor?
Answer:Golden State Warriors forward Kevin Durant (27.2 ppg).
This week’s trivia question:What was the first name given to the Farallon Islands?
Editor’s note
Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub’s OurSF.
