You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (58 page)

Wright’s ambition was set afire and for the next two years he lobbied to turn the “United States into a shining beacon of drug morality.”
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In this manner, he would embarrass the world into going along with global narcotics criminalization. Wright ran into two problems. One, national drug laws would require a national police force and the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution prevented this. Wright complained to his superior that “it has been a difficult business. . . The Constitution is constantly getting in the way.”
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Wright bypassed the Founding Fathers’ restriction through a recently-passed Supreme Court decision that ruled the federal government could regulate anything that it taxed. Wright drew up a bill that required anyone dealing with drugs to register, pay a license fee, and keep records. This underhanded maneuver gave federal Treasury Department agents complete control over narcotics.

Wright’s second problem was convincing skeptics that the federal government needed more power. Here Wright used race-baiting. Opium smoking was favored by Chinese immigrants who were imported to build the Western railways, so Wright warned skeptical Westerners that opium smoking drove white women into the arms of Chinese men. For the skeptical Southerners, Wright used a hackneyed danger, claiming cocaine turned black men into rapists. This fit nicely into the myth already circulating that cocaine made blacks unruly and gave them superhuman strength.

Through these lies Wright badgered foreign dignitaries and his superiors at the State Department into having another International Conference on Opium in 1911. The British were so angered by Wright’s heavy-handed manipulation and exaggeration that the State Department asked Wright to find another line of work. He refused, as he was “a man with a cause.”
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At this conference he obligated the United States to pass a federal anti-narcotics law—
despite not having authority to do so
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The unscrupulous Wright then returned to America and told Congress that this treaty gave them no choice in the matter and that they had to enact a law. The Harrison Narcotics Act would pass in 1914 because Wright hoodwinked his country. Ironically, Wright would be fired by the Secretary of State before the bill’s passage because he was an alcoholic who came to work drunk.

Besides the fact that the country believed they were bound by international agreement, Wright’s bill passed with little debate because it appeared to be merely gathering information about drug dispensation. However, the Treasury Department
promptly used Wright’s crafty wording to jail doctors who they believed were giving drugs to “addicts.”
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Thousands of drug-addicted Americans were now criminals. Six weeks after the bill’s passage the
New York Medical Journal
read:

The next wowser was a bitter veteran of Prohibition’s futile war on alcohol. Harry Anslinger believed Prohibition failed because it was not fought hard enough. As the head of the Prohibition Unit’s foreign control division, Anslinger had pushed for harsher penalties for bootleggers and drinkers. Before Prohibition ended in 1933 Anslinger was temporarily put in charge of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN).

Similar to J. Edgar Hoover’s lifelong seizure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Anslinger made the FBN his fiefdom for over three decades. Whereas Hoover was able to use his agents to blackmail and intimidate political opponents, Anslinger’s ace card was his absolute control over the medical market for painkillers. He determined who had access to this lucre and, as of 1936, he only allowed eight companies. Not coincidentally, these companies have become today’s billion-dollar
pharmaceutical behemoths and include names such as Merck, Parke-Davis, and Eli Lilly. Just as Anslinger protected them from competition, they protected him with intense lobbying.

Pharmaceutical money and influential anti-drug zealots would make Anslinger indestructible. This was most apparent in 1932. An Anslinger memo instructing FBN agents to look for an informant described as “a ginger-colored nigger” enraged the White House and moved the senator from Anslinger’s home state to call for his resignation. Anslinger did not resign and stayed on for another thirty years.

The Harrison Narcotics Act only outlawed opium, its derivatives (morphine, heroin, etc.), and cocaine. Anslinger was initially against criminalizing marijuana. He cogently observed that marijuana was a weed that grows “like dandelions.”
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However, a movement was building in the Western states against it and Anslinger could not resist using marijuana to get his agency more money.

Marijuana was still smoked primarily by Mexicans, although its use had spread to industrial cities as an alternative to alcohol during Prohibition.
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Just as ill will toward Chinese immigrants was the motive behind criminalizing opium smoking, the Mexican immigrants were about to get the same recreational management.

This 1929 Montana report is representative of the deliberations behind antimarijuana legislation:

At the federal level passage would not be as easy, so Anslinger and his agents went on a publicity tour. Although not as funny as Dr. Ulsher, Anslinger was just as dishonest. He claimed that marijuana was more addictive than cocaine and opium, and that it caused insanity.
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In a 1936 pamphlet, the FBN asserted that:

Anslinger loved to dazzle audiences with grisly crimes “caused” by marijuana.
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One of his favorites was that of Victor Licata. Licata was a twenty-one-year-old Floridian who slaughtered his entire family with an axe. Anslinger would not mention that Licata had long been considered mentally unstable, and instead attributed his acts to the fact that Licata was “addicted to smoking marihuana cigarettes.” Whenever possible, Anslinger would produce pictures of the carnage.

In the 1937 Congressional hearings on the bill before the House Ways and Means Committee, Anslinger’s testimony consisted almost entirely of hearsay—newspaper clippings and anecdotes from his notes. One Anslinger note read, “Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with female students (white) smoking and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result pregnancy.”
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The American Medical Association (AMA) opposed regulation of marijuana, which doctors had used as a medicine for over one hundred years, and had an actual doctor testify.
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Dr. William Woodward pointed out that many of the facts and figures that Anslinger quoted from newspaper articles actually originated with Anslinger, so Anslinger was merely quoting himself. Woodward pointed out that there was no evidence of marijuana causing crime, no evidence of a marijuana crisis among children, and also pointedly asked why no one from the Public Health Service was present to testify. (The reason no one from the Public Health Service was there was that the assistant surgeon general had told Anslinger that marijuana did not produce dependence.)

This testimony incensed the congressmen. Obviously someone was jerking their chain and they responded by tearing Woodward apart.
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He was accused of being obstructive and evasive. The chairman scolded the doctor: “If you want to advise us on legislation you ought to come here with some constructive proposals rather than criticism, rather than trying to throw obstacles in the way of something that the Federal Government is trying to do.”
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When the bill went before the entire House of Representatives for the final vote, its discussion lasted less than two minutes. When a congressman asked if the AMA approved of the bill, the House Ways and Means Committee member Fred Vinson promptly responded, “Their Doctor Wentworth came down here. They support this bill a hundred percent.”
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The future chief justice of the Supreme Court blatantly lied and did not even bother to get the poor doctor’s name right.

In the next five years Anslinger’s FBN destroyed 60,000 tons of marijuana and arrested about a thousand people annually for violating the marijuana law.
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Anslinger did not forget the AMA’s act of treason either. From mid-1937 through 1939, the FBN prosecuted more than three thousand doctors. In 1939 the AMA bowed to Anslinger and came out against marijuana. From 1939–1949 only three doctors were prosecuted by the FBN for drug activity.
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After adding marijuana to the war Anslinger marched forward spewing lies and propaganda for another quarter-century.
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The figures he pulled out of his head reflected the goals he had when he opened his mouth.

While Anslinger was seeking to criminalize marijuana, the country was in a “marijuana crisis” and marijuana drove a young man to axe his entire family. After the battle was won, alarmist non-governmental organizations were told to clam it. One, the FBN now wanted to look like it had fixed the “problem.”
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Two, Anslinger’s propaganda had worked too well. People actually believed marijuana dictated criminals’ actions. Prosecutors were running into the defense that marijuana made defendants commit crimes. By the 1950s, Anslinger was testifying before Congress that marijuana was not “the controlling factor in the commission of crimes.”
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