“Ganja” use was next reported in 1909 in the port of New Orleans, in the black dominated “Storeyville” section frequented by sailors.

New Orleans’ Storeyville was filled with cabarets, brothels, music, and all the other usual accoutrements of “red light” districts the world over. Sailors from the islands took their shore leave and their marijuana there.

Blackface...

The Public Safety Commissioner of New Orleans wrote that, “marijuana was the most frightening and vicious drug ever to hit New Orleans,” and in 1910 warned that regular users might number as high as 200 in Storeyville alone.

To the DA and Public Safety Commissioners and New Orleans newspapers from 1910 through the 1930s, marijuana’s insidious evil influence apparently manifested itself in making the “darkies” think they were as good as “white men.”

In fact, marijuana was being blamed for the first refusals of black entertainers to wear blackface* and for hysterical laughter by “negroes” under marijuana’s influence when told to cross a street or go to the back of the trolley, etc.

*That’s right; your eyes have not deceived you. Because of a curious quirk in the “Jim Crow” (segregation) laws, black Americans were banned from any stage in the Deep South (and most other places in the North and West also). “Negroes” had to wear (through the 1920s) blackface - (like Al Jolson wore when he sang “Swanee”) - a dye which white entertainers wore to resemble or mimic black people. Actually, by “Jim Crow” law, blacks were not allowed on the stage at all, but because of their talent were allowed to sneak/enter through back doors, put on blackface, and pretend to be a white person playing the part of a black person...

…and all that Jazz

In New Orleans, whites were also concerned that black musicians, rumored to smoke marijuana, were spreading (selling) a very powerful (popular) new “voodoo” music that forced even decent white women to tap their feet and was ultimately aimed at throwing off the yoke of the whites. Today we call that new music... jazz!

Blacks obviously played upon the white New Orleans racists’ fears of “voodoo” to try to keep whites out of their lives. Jazz’s birthplace is generally recognized to be Storeyville, New Orleans, home of original innovators: Buddy Bohler, Buck Johnson and others (1909-1917). Storeyville was also the birthplace of Louis Armstrong* (1900).

*In 1930 - one year after Louis Armstrong recorded “Muggles” (read: “marijuana”) - he was arrested for a marijuana cigarette in Los Angeles and put in jail for 10 days until he agreed to leave California and not return for two years.

 http://www.jackherer.com/chapter13.html

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The first recorded use of 'marihuana' in the United States, in 1909, was in Storyville, the red light district of the port of New Orleans where Louis Armstrong was born in 1901 and is also regarded as the birthplace of Jazz. According to Ernest L.Abel: 'It was in these bordellos, where music provided the background and not the primary focus of attention, that marihuana became an integral part of the jazz era. Unlike booze, which dulled and incapacitated, marihuana enabled musicians whose job required them to play long into the night to forget their exhaustion. Moreover, the drug seemed to make their music sound more imaginative and unique, at least to those who played and listened while under its sensorial influence.'

The jazz and swing music associated with 'Negroes, Mexicans and entertainers' was declared to be an 'outgrowth of marihuana use'. Whites were concerned that itinerant black musicians were spreading a very powerful new 'voodoo' music that forced even decent white women to tap their feet in rhythm and that they also sold the evil weed that caused even the most respectable types to abandon their inhibitions. According to Harry Shapiro, 'In the early Twenties, marihuana, muggles, muta, gage, tea, reefer, grifa, Mary Warner, Mary Jane or rosa maria was known almost exclusively to musicians.'

Since smoking marihuana was associated with wild music and crazy behaviour - and with Negroes - the authorities moved quickly to stamp it out. From 1910 through to the end of the 1930's, New Orleans government officials and media conducted a vicious, racist press campaign that was to set an unseemly precedent for the anti-pot propaganda to come. New Orleans was first to ban the weed, in 1923, and all Louisiana followed suit in 1927. By the time that Prohibition (of alcohol) was repealed in 1933, seventeen States had banned cannabis.

http://www.ukcia.org/potculture/20/madness.html 

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The first recorded use of 'marihuana' in the United States