| Harry J. Anslinger | |
|---|---|
| 1st Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics | |
| In office August 12, 1930 – May 1962 |
|
| President | Herbert Hoover Franklin D. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy |
| Succeeded by | Henry Giordano |
| Personal details | |
| Born | May 20, 1892 |
| Died | November 14, 1975 (aged 83) Altoona, Pennsylvania |
| Spouse(s) | Martha Kind Denniston |
Harry Jacob Anslinger (May 20, 1892 – November 14, 1975) held office as the Assistant Prohibition Commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition, before being appointed as the first Commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) on August 12, 1930.
Anslinger held office an unprecedented 32 years in his role as Commissioner until 1962. He then held office two years as US Representative to the United Nations Narcotics Commission. The responsibilities once held by Anslinger are now largely under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy. He died at the age of 83 of heart failure in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania.
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Anslinger's father, Robert J. Anslinger, was born in Bern, Switzerland and had worked in that country as a barber. His mother, Rosa Christiana Fladt, was born in Baden, Germany. In 1881, the family emigrated to the United States. Robert Anslinger worked in New York for two years, before settling in Altoona, Pennsylvania. In 1892, the same year his son Harry was born, Robert Anslinger went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Harry Anslinger later claimed that he had witnessed a scene that affected his life. When he was 12, he heard the screams of a morphine addict that were silenced only by a boy returning from a pharmacist to supply the addict with more morphine. Anslinger was appalled that the drug was so powerful and that children had ready access to such drugs. However, the experience did not stop Anslinger, while acting as the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, from authorizing a druggist near the White House to fill a morphine prescription for an addicted Senator Joseph McCarthy.[1]
Anslinger enrolled at Altoona Business College at the age of 17. He also went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1913, he was granted a furlough so he could enroll at Pennsylvania State College, where studied in a two-year associate degree program in engineering and business management.
Anslinger married Martha Kind Denniston (Sept 1886 - Oct 10, 1961) in 1917. In 1930, at age 38, when he was appointed as the first Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, he was renting an apartment at 16th & R Street in Washington, DC for $90 per month, where he lived with his wife Martha and son Joseph L. Anslinger (May 24, 1911 - Nov 1982), who were 44 and 18, respectively.
Anslinger gained notoriety early in his career. At the age of 23 (in 1915), while working as an investigator for the Pennsylvania Railroad, he performed a detailed investigation that found the claim of a widower in a railroad accident to be fraudulent. He saved the company $50,000 and was promoted to captain of railroad police.
From 1917 to 1928, Anslinger worked for various military and police organizations. His tour of duty took him all over the world, from Germany to Venezuela to Japan. His focus was on stopping international drug trafficking, and he is widely blamed with shaping not only America's domestic and international drug policies, but for having influence on drug policies of other nations, particularly those that had not debated the issues internally.
By 1929, Anslinger returned from his international tour to work as an assistant Commissioner in the United States Bureau of Prohibition. Around this time, corruption and scandal gripped Prohibition and Narcotics agencies. The ensuing shake-ups and re-organizations set the stage for Anslinger, perceived as an honest and incorruptible figure, to advance not only in rank but to great political stature.
In 1930, Anslinger was appointed to the newly-created FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics) as its first Commissioner. The FBN, like the Bureau of Prohibition, was under the auspices of the U.S. Treasury Department. At that time, the trade of alcohol and drugs was considered a loss of revenue because, as illegal substances, they could not be taxed. Anslinger was appointed by Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew W. Mellon, and given a budget of $100,000.
Restrictions for cannabis as a drug, often called Indian Hemp in documents before the 1940s, started in local laws in New York already in 1860 and was followed by local laws in many other states and by state laws in the 1910s and 1920s.[2] The early laws against the cannabis drugs were often passed with little public attention. Concern about marijuana was related primarily to the fear that hashish or marijuana use would spread as a substitute for the opiates. In 1925 United States supported regulation of Indian hemp, Cannabis for use as a drug, in the International Opium Convention.[3] Recommendations from the International Opium Convention inspired the work with The Uniform State Narcotic Act between 1925 and 1932. Harry J. Anslinger became an active person in this process from about 1930.[4][5]
Anslinger received, as head of The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) (from his point of view), an alarming increase of reports about smoking of marijuana in 1936 that continued to spread at an accelerated pace in 1937. Before, smoking of marijuana had been relatively slight and confined to the Southwest, particularly along the Mexican border. The Bureau launched two important steps. First, the Bureau prepared a legislative plan to seek from Congress a new law that would place marijuana and its distribution directly under federal control. Second, Anslinger ran a campaign against marijuana on radio and at major forums.[6]
Some of his critics allege that Anslinger and the campaign against marijuana had an hidden agenda, DuPont petrochemical interests and William Randolph Hearst together created the highly sensational anti-marijuana campaign to eliminate hemp as an industrial competitor. Indeed, Anslinger did not himself consider marijuana a serious threat to American society until in the fourth year of his tenure (1934), at which point an anti-marijuana campaign, aimed at alarming the public, became his primary focus as part of the government's broader push to outlaw all drugs.[7]
Members of the League of Nations had already implemented restrictions for marijuana in the beginning of the 1930s and restrictions started in many states in U.S years before Anslinger was appointed. Both president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Attorney General publicly supported this development in 1935.[7]
Around 1931 advertising started for hemp as the new billion dollar crop because of a decorticator working miracles on the hemp crop and taking the amount of time to harvest an acre of hemp down to 1-1.5 hours when 2 hours was the best time they could get harvesting cotton. But this could not change the fact that is it is only the outer part of a hemp stem, about 25% of the stem, that contains long usable fibers. New technology has not created growing billion dollar industries in countries where it is legal to harvest hemp.[8][9] See also Hemp#Paper.
By using the mass media as his forum (receiving much support from William Randolph Hearst), Anslinger propelled the anti-marijuana sentiment from the state level to a national movement. Writing for The American Magazine, the best examples were contained in his "Gore File", a collection of quotes from police reports, by later opponents described as police-blotter-type narratives of heinous cases, most with no substantiation, linking graphically depicted offenses with the drug. Anslinger sometimes used the very brief and concise language in many police reports when he wrote about drug crimes:
“By the tons it is coming into this country — the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms…. Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him….”
Anslinger has been accused to be responsible for racial themes in articles against marijuana in the 1930s.
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
"The first Federal law-enforcement administrator to recognize the signs of a national criminal syndication and sound the alarm was Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics in the Treasury" (Ronald Reagan 1986)[14]
When Anslinger was interviewed in 1954 about drug abuse (see below), he did not mention anything about race or sex. In his book The Protectors (1964) Anslinger has a chapter called "Jazz and Junk Don't Mix" about the black jazz musicians Billie Holliday and Charlie Parker, who both died after years of heavy drug abuse:
Later in his career, Anslinger was scrutinized for insubordination by refusing to desist from an attempt to halt the ABA/AMA Joint Report on narcotic addiction, a publication edited by the sociology Professor Alfred R. Lindesmith of Indiana University. Lindesmith wrote, among other works, Opiate Addiction (1947), The Addict and the Law (1965), and a number of articles condemning the criminalization of addiction. Nearly everything Lindesmith did was critical of the War on Drugs, specifically condemning Anslinger’s role. The AMA/ABA controversy is sometimes credited with ending Anslinger's position of Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
In fact, Anslinger was surprised to be re-appointed by President John F. Kennedy in February 1961. The new President had a tendency to invigorate the government with more youthful civil servants and by 1962 Anslinger was 70 years old, the mandatory age for retirement in his position. In addition, during the previous year he had witnessed his wife Martha's slow and agonizing death due to heart failure and lost some of his drive and ambition. He submitted his resignation to President Kennedy on his 70th birthday, May 20, 1962. Since Kennedy did not have a successor, Anslinger stayed in his $18,500 a year ($125,535 in 2007 dollars) position until later that year. He was succeeded by Henry Giordano. Following that, he was the United States Representative to the United Nations Narcotics Commission for two years after which he retired.
By 1973, Anslinger was completely blind, had a debilitatingly enlarged prostate gland, and suffered from angina.
On November 14, 1975, at 1 pm, Anslinger died of heart failure at Mercy Hospital (now known as Bon Secours Hospital Campus of the Altoona Regional Health System) in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He was 83. He was survived by his son Joseph L. Anslinger and a sister. According to John McWilliams' 1990 book The Protectors, Anslinger's daughter-in-law Bea at that time still lived in Anslinger's home in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania.
Anslinger is buried in Hollidaysburg Presbyterian Cemetery, Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, USA Plot: Sec. C, Lot 320.[15]
Note (1): Larry Sloman, Reefer Madness: A History of Marijuana in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979), pp 30–31
| Preceded by |
Commissioner Federal Bureau of Narcotics 1930 – 1962 |
Succeeded by Henry Giordano |