Did Richard Nixon Finger Louis Armstrong's Wife Lucille for a Pot Bust?

Louis and Lucille

On the evening of January 16, 1954 Louis Armstrong sat at the Alexander Hamilton Hotel at 631 O’Farrell Street in San Francisco and wrote what has been called “one of the most stunning documents Armstrong ever composed.”

"Mr. Glaser, you must see to it that I have special permission to smoke all the reefers that I want to when I want or I will just have to put this horn down, that's all," the letter says, addressing Armstrong’s manager. "I can gladly vouch for a nice, fat stick of gage, which relaxes my nerves, if I have any...I can't afford to be ...tense, fearing that any minute I'm going to be arrested, brought to jail for a silly little minor thing like marijuana."

The incident that prompted Louis to write about his love for marijuana was the arrest of his wife Lucille on marijuana charges in Hawaii on New Year’s Day, 1954. Lucille was nabbed by federal narcotics agents at the airport where a US Customs inspector found one cigarette and two stubs, totaling 14.8 grams of marijuana, in her eyeglass case.

The bust was a big deal: Louis almost lost a charity gig for the March of Dimes and was nearly barred from performing in Hawaii. Lucille posted $300 bail and appeared at a day-long hearing on January 5 with Louis sitting in the spectators’ section.  She pleaded guilty for expediency, she said, but protested her innocence. It's been widely speculated that it was Louis's stash, but the small amount of pot found in Lucille's personal belongs makes me wonder if she was a Tokin' Woman herself.

The judge reduced Lucille’s fine to $200 owing to her husband's good works. "At the start of 1954, he was at the peak of his popularity and was already being touted as an ‘Ambassador of Goodwill’ due to his tremendous popularity overseas," wrote Ricky Riccardi, who details the incident in his book What a Wonderful World.

An often-told story relates that Armstrong once prevailed on Richard Nixon to carry his valise containing pot through an airport for him. LA-based trumpeter Jack Coan, who toured the Midwest with Louis and Pat Boone in 1967, told me in October 2012 that that Satchmo laughed heartily every time he told the story, pinpointing the locale as Japan.

Both Armstrong and then-VP Nixon toured Japan in late 1953, just before Lucille’s arrest. The courier caper most likely would have happened on December 14, the day Nixon left Japan and three days before Louis's first concert there. 

The timing begs the question: Did Nixon or someone in his entourage figure out the Vice President had been used for a drug mule and fail to see the humor in it, leading to Lucille's arrest?

Louis hadn’t been in trouble with the law since 1930, when he was arrested outside the Cotton Club in LA while smoking a joint. That incident and his subsequent jailing ultimately lead to Joe Glaser, an Al Capone acolyte, taking over Armstrong’s career, and later suppressing his writings about marijuana.

Lucille Armstrong in 1983

A former dancer at Harlem's Cotton Club, Lucille Armstrong became a community activist after Louis's death, drafted by Gov. Rockefeller. Deciding drug rehabilitation wasn't her thing, she chose an appointment on the NY Committee on Aging. 

Riccardi, who is the archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, credits Lucille with preserving Armstrong's letter to Glaser, and his taped audio version.  

"Can you imagine anyone giving Lucille all of those headaches and grief over a mere small pittance such as gage, something that grows out in the backyard among the chickens and so forth,” Louis emoted in his letter. “I just won't carry on with such fear over nothing and I don't intend to ever stop smoking it, not as long as it grows. And there is no one on this earth that can ever stop it all from growing. No one but Jesus--and he wouldn't dare. Because he feels the same way that I do about it."

The San Francisco hotel
where Louis wrote about gage.

Gage “ain't nothin' but medicine," Louis concluded, words that will resonate with medical marijuana advocates in the city where he wrote them. The medical marijuana movement began in San Francisco, where activist Dennis Peron rallied the HIV/AIDS community to fight for their rights in the early 1990s. The state Proposition 215 followed in 1996, making California the first state to legalize marijuana for medicine.

Those events and others will be marked by a conference happening January 26 & 27 at Ft. Mason Conference Center in San Francisco, sponsored by California NORML. The conference will take place at the 100th anniversary of cannabis prohibition in California. 

It’s high time to end the Hundred Year Weed War that has harassed and imprisoned so many of our citizens, including some of our best and brightest.

Climb On the Drug Peace Train

UPDATE 2024: Turns out, Nixon always knew marijuana wasn't very harmful. 

Today on the 40th anniversary of the day Richard Nixon declared war on “drugs,” I happened to find myself at an Amtrak station. Standing in a (long, inefficient) line waiting to buy tickets, I noticed a poster celebrating the 40th anniversary of Amtrak, the national railroad system which also began in 1971.

It almost made me cry. Imagine what our rail system would look like today if instead of spending billions on our failed war on drugs, we’d have put that money into our country’s infrastructure. How many gallons of gasoline would we have saved? How much would we have improved air quality? How many trips would have been taken, broadening people’s experiences or just making their lives a little easier, giving them more time with family and friends? How many other programs, schools, libraries and parks could we have funded? How many highway deaths might we have prevented?

Rick Steves, the PBS travel host and author, has been coming to NORML conferences to speak in favor of legalizing marijuana. "To me travel is accelerated living," Steves enthused in 2005. "Travel carbonates your life. It makes things different, it sort of refreshes your perspective and in a lot of ways, that's like marijuana, I would say. . . And of course when you travel in Europe you realize that there is a non-criminal approach to marijuana that could be quite inspirational to American policy makers if they would just learn about it."

Every time I consider taking Amtrak, I see that routes have been cut or turned into bus routes instead. Only one daily train travels from Los Angeles to Oakland, and it takes 11 hours to do so. Some innovations like car trains are boosting ridership, but with nearly all federal funds going to highways or air travel, trains barely get noticed. California’s high speed rail plans keep getting derailed over funding and NIMBY issues; ditto the North Coast Railroad. But everyone has money to spend on prisons for drug offenders.

I first became politically active in 1971 at the age of 13, campaigning against Richard Nixon when he ran for his second term as president. I was so disillusioned when he won by a landslide (aided by his dirty tricks) that I didn’t become politically active again until 1991, when I became a hemp/marijuana law reform activist. That the last 20 years of my life have been wasted fighting a battle that shouldn’t need to be fought is a drop in the bucket compared to all the other wasted lives and resources we’ve dropped down the well of woe that is the war on drugs.

The first president I got to vote for, Nixon’s eventual successor Jimmy Carter, has an oped in today's New York Times in support of drug policy reforms called for in a report by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Anan, Sir Richard Branson, and past presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia.

Carter wrote,

Drug policies here are more punitive and counterproductive than in other democracies, and have brought about an explosion in prison populations. At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million.

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that, in 1980, 10 percent of his state's budget went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and only 7.5 percent to higher education.

While president, Carter was for marijuana decriminalization, until his drug chief was smeared for taking cocaine at a party. Then he got drummed out of office over the Iranian hostage crisis which, it turns out, Reagan negotiated away at the root of the reprehensible Iran-Contra affair. That the husband of Hillary Clinton’s traveling chief of staff has just resigned over a trivial tweet is proof that the dirty tricks are alive and well.

Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for his tricks and Betty Ford (pictured here with her husband at a whistle stop) founded a drug treatment center because of her problems with alcohol and painkillers. Asked by Morley Safer as first lady what she thought about her children possibly using marijuana, Betty replied, "I think if I were their age I probably would have been interested to see the effect." She compared the use of marijuana at the time to her generation's consumption of beer.

Gerald and Betty’s son Jack said in an interview, "I've smoked marijuana and I don't think that's so exceptional for people growing up in the 1960s. The fact that there's so much moral indignation over it is one of the reasons there are so any problems with the disillusionment and alienation of young people in this country."

With the last three sitting presidents admitted former pot smokers, policy is at a standstill at the federal level. President Obama called drug legalization “an entirely legitimate topic for debate” earlier this year in response to yet another internet poll that made this the top issue among Americans. But when the report Carter has endorsed came out, Obama administration officials rejected the notion with more of its failed “just say no" rhetoric.

Mark Twain said, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." We've got to get this country moving again, off the War on Drugs train and onto one of tolerance and reason that will take us into the future. Otherwise it won’t be, as Utah Phillips sang, “Daddy, What’s a Train?” it will be, “Daddy, What’s a Country?”

All aboard.