For the United States, see my answer in this thread.

For Mexico, it's worth noting that marijuana was banned there before it was in the United States, which Isaac Campos explores in Home Grown (2012). Its association with sacred rituals, divination, and madness were established by the end of the eighteenth century, and in the next hundred years it came to be unequivocally associated with violence among soldiers, prisoners, and criminals. So, marijuana's link to deviancy was actually "invented" there before it was imported (or exported) north.

The above post and Campos' book also make clear that subjective experience can greatly alter drug experiences among individuals. Have you heard of people getting paranoid, sleepy, productive, or hungry while high on pot? How are their experiences so divergent? Why do people have "bad" acid trips? For that matter, why doesn't everyone enjoy supposedly universally euphoric drugs like opiates? This might explain how "refer madness" seemed real enough when you don't have any counterexamples of getting the munchies and going to sleep.