An important person in the telling of how hemp and cannabis became illegal is the ambitious government employee and dutiful corporate puppet named Harry Jacob Anslinger. Born to a Swiss immigrant family in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on May 20, 1892, this power-hungry man was the assistant Prohibition Commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition. Blinded in one eye since childhood, it appears that he subscribed to the theory that if one tells a lie enough times it will become truth to those who hear it. It also appears that the lie could become believable to the person telling it.
Anslinger’s father, Robert, was a railroad security guard who helped his son get a job, also as a railroad security guard. After Harry Anslinger graduated from college he was hired by the railroad as an arson investigator and statistician.
During World War I Anslinger worked in the War Department headquarters in Washington where his job involved government contracts with weapons manufacturers. Later, while working for the State Department, he was sent to the American embassy in the Netherlands where his fluency in the German language was utilized in intelligence work.
As the vice-consul in the German town of Hamburg, Anslinger was involved in busting a group of workers on oceangoing merchant ships who were smuggling drugs into the U.S. He also worked in Venezuela and the Bahamas, where he was involved in busting European-based merchant ships smuggling alcohol into the U.S. during Prohibition.
By 1929 Anslinger had been promoted as the assistant commissioner in the narcotics task force of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Prohibition Bureau. This was a department of the Treasury set up as the Inland Revenue Bureau in 1914 to enforce tax laws established by the Harrison Act, which taxed and required registration of the sale of coca, opium, and related derivatives by those who imported, produced, or sold them as pharmaceuticals.
On August 12, 1930, Anslinger was appointed to be the first commissioner of the Treasury Department’s new Federal Bureau of Narcotics. That department was created from an office already established under the Prohibition Unit, but had to be reestablished after the former head, Colonel Levi G. Nutt, and officers in the department had been removed when they were found to have been involved in mishandling crime records and were associating with a New York mobster named Arnold Rothstein.
Anslinger’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics enforced laws governing both legal (prescription) and illegal drugs (cocaine, heroin, opium, morphine). As the bureau set about strengthening the enforcement of drug laws, cannabis was eyed as a substance that should also be controlled. As I will explain, the reasoning for focusing on placing laws on cannabis was not based on a drug problem. Even the U.S. Treasury’s own annual report for 1931 expressed the opinion that, “A great deal of public interest has been aroused by newspaper articles appearing from time to time on the evils of the abuse of marihuana, or Indian hemp. This publicity tends to magnify the extent of the evil and lends color to the inference that there is an alarming spread of the improper use of the drug, whereas the actual increase in such use may not have been inordinately large.”
Why and how did the treasury change its stance?
Anslinger was the person often credited with being chiefly responsible for demonizing marijuana and hemp. He remained in his job for 32 years, retiring when he turned 70. Some say President John F. Kennedy fired Anslinger. For two years after leaving the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger was the U.S. Representative to the United Nations Narcotics Commission.
Some say that Anslinger was only doing his job, and that he was bound by strict standards set to avoid any conflict of interest under rules established in response to the former mess created under Colonel Levi G. Nutt. But if you consider what Anslinger did, and to whom he was related, it is quite easy to see that there were clear conflicts of interest. Take a look at what he did, and who benefited from his actions:
One way to increase the budget of your department when you are head of a branch of the U.S. government is to make certain that your job looks really important. To ensure that your job is secure, you also connect with those who will help it remain that way. When you see other departments of the government as your competitors, you make sure that your department does not get stuck in the shadow.
Another department of the government that was involved in law enforcement was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The legendary J. Edgar Hoover was the head of that department and he was quite aggressive in his role. He cooperated with the media of the day to get press coverage whenever he busted a mobster. Romanticizing cops and robbers made for interesting reading, sold newspapers, and helped establish the department as an important branch of the government that was actively working to protect citizens from evil, dangerous, bad people. Hoover was king of perpetuating the hero syndrome, successfully placing himself on the throne of adulation as the conqueror of bad people.
While Hoover was a master of manipulating government and public opinion to bolster and romanticize his position, Anslinger, while far from masterful, wasn’t far behind on his impact in the formation of laws and the creation of governmental standards.
After a problematic period of underfunding as a result of the Great Depression, Anslinger learned ways of manipulating government to increase the budget of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Under Anslinger the Federal Bureau of Narcotics eventually built a national and international network of officers and undercover agents working to enforce drug laws. These were the very same laws he helped to strengthen or create by using hype and lies as well as his connections to and work with corrupt politicians, government employees, and wealthy business people.
It can be said that Hoover and his FBI stood as Anslinger’s best prototype of how to run a government crime department. The agenda seemed to be to do whatever it takes to secure the position. Postulating as an important figure at every opportunity was the standard practice, even if you had to lie, cheat, and steal to do so. Anslinger even appeared as himself as the important Federal Bureau of Narcotics head in a 1948 Hollywood movie titled To the End of the Earth, which used Federal Bureau of Narcotics files to build the story line.
This was the era of the promotion of the virtues of work. The country had been through President Herbert Hoover, an orphan who became the first student at Stanford University, went on to become a worldwide mining expert; headed European relief efforts after WWI; became the Secretary of Commerce; headed relief efforts of the Great Mississippi Flood, and served in the White House from 1929-33. He was also a relative of future War on Drugs President Richard M. Nixon, and he worked to organize the Federal Bureau of Prisons. During his time as Secretary of Commerce, Hoover voiced support for Prohibition as a “noble experiment,” and as president he worked to prosecute Mafia heads that broke the Prohibition laws. Secretly, Hoover paid visit to the Belgian Embassy to converse and enjoy drinking wine on what was legally foreign soil.
Hoover believed that there were technical solutions to economic and social problems. One thing Hoover did was use the Commerce Department to establish a cooperative partnership between government and business, including the banking, utilities, navigation, corporate farming, and petroleum industries. He wanted efficiency and product and design standards, as well as to increase international trade by opening government offices in other countries to assist American companies in conducting business. Corporate welfare was coming into play, providing financial aid to large businesses and benefiting the wealthy. But he also increased taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, and doubled the estate tax. After Hoover had been put out of office, many of his theories stuck, and others were still being promoted, forging a strong bond between government and corporate interests.
The industrialization of the country was idealized and mass consumerism was on its way in. Factories were kicking into gear manufacturing mass-marketed products. Trains, planes, trucks, and automobiles sped up transportation and communication. It was Hoover’s 1928 campaign slogan that there would be, “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” An industrious country with a strong workforce, a vibrant economy, and a well-organized military was a strong and righteous country. Those who worked hard were good citizens. Any display of what could be interpreted as laziness was unpatriotic. A person’s value was based on the wealth they generated. Family values were based around contribution to the workforce. Upstanding businessmen were to be idolized. The rule of money took hold of politics. Anything that could possibly take people away from hard work and industriousness was bad. Vices were to be looked down on, and to be punished. All of this helped to make those who promoted this work ethic, the White male billionaire businessmen and their White male politician friends, to become richer on the backs of those who worked in the factories and on increasing numbers of corporate-owned farms, many of which were worked by minorities living on the fringes of the uppity, xenophobic, and WASP society that controlled the money, the laws, and the access to good schools, job promotions, and privilege. Those who were rich were consolidating businesses to become wealthy. It was the era that the Mafia also gained strength working behind the scenes to supply alcohol while establishing its own form of underground government. And the workforce kept expanding with increasingly large numbers of people working for the companies that were being financially linked to the wealthy, such as the war profiteer Jack Pierpont “J.P.” Morgan, as well as Henry Ford, Andrew Mellon, William Randolph Hearst, and major petroleum, coal, steel, banking, tobacco, and farming interests. Monetary gain for the wealthy took precedence over the safety and health interests of the general populace, as well as the environment.
Entwined in the mix of government leaders and the wealthy were those who knew how to exploit these social conditions to their own advantage.
It was in 1934 that Anslinger began to aggressively campaign to strengthen and broaden laws to ban marijuana. This also worked to increase the stature of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics as an important government department, and subsequently worked to increase government funding for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Not only that, but his campaign helped increase the awareness of drug laws in state, county, and city law departments. This meant that local police departments took up the cause of busting those who broke marijuana laws. With local law enforcement busting drug offenders, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics could spend less on maintaining, equipping, and paying staff.
When Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933 this freed up money spent on enforcing laws against alcohol, and brought more money into enforcing drug laws.
The busting of drug criminals also worked in the interests of the newly thriving alcohol industry, which helped to finance antimarijuana propaganda, including the 1936 film Reefer Madness, which used exaggerated high drama and distortions to warn young people against the so-called evils of smoking weed. The film centers on marijuana-smoking young adults corrupting others by throwing marijuana parties. One livid character in the film ends up in an insane asylum with a mind supposedly ruined by marijuana. The film fails at its goal of warning against substance abuse, but succeeds at being oddly entertaining.
Demonizing marijuana worked in the favor of the alcohol industry. If people didn’t, or couldn’t, spend money on drugs, they could spend more on alcohol.
“The hemp breeding work, carried on by the Bureau for more than 20 years, was discontinued in 1933, but practical results are still evident in commercial fields. A hemp grower in Kentucky reported a yield of 1,750 pounds per acre of clean, dew-retted fiber from 100 acres of the pedigreed variety Chinamington grown in 1934. This is more than twice the average yield obtained from ordinary unselected hemp seed.”
– Annual Reports of the Department of Agriculture, page 6; U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1935
With a clear view of from where the money flowed into his department, and realizing how he could increase the funding, by 1935 Anslinger was coming down hard on marijuana.
What is interesting is that Anslinger worked against companies that wanted to create different uses for the marijuana and hemp plant, and refused to allow scientific institutions from having access to the plant for scientific studies. He was behind the discontinuation of government funding for hemp breeding work. Why did he do this? Let’s explore the possibilities.