Editor’s note: (Wikipedia: 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 Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) on August 12, 1930.
He held office an unprecedented 32 years in his role holding office until 1962. He then held office two years as US Representative to the United Nations Narcotics Commission. The responsibilities once held by Harry J. Anslinger are now largely under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy.)
The evidence Harry Anslinger presented on behalf his Marijuana Tax Act in 1937 was such gross exaggeration of a few sensational cases and he himself was so obviously lacking in appropriate training and experience that current “marijuana” policy has to be either a daring fraud sustained beyond reason or a brilliantly planned deception. There’s simply no middle ground because the policy’s fraudulent nature can no longer be hidden and “marijuana” possession still automatically results in arrest at virtually every US or international port of entry.
On a personal level, I still remember Anslinger as a pompously self-important bureaucrat from a government training film seen during my third-year in medical school (1956), thus I favor the first explanation. Seated behind a huge desk, unfailingly referred to in the voice-over as “the honorable” Harry Anslinger, he menacingly warned of dangers to physicians and nurses implicit in their access to “narcotics” and promised swift punishment to any who abused their trust.
Beyond that improbable air of omnipotence, Anslinger could not possibly have anticipated the sweeping array of arguments and augmentations that would be invoked to justify his lie once he left office and “kids” began to discover the appeal of “reefer” in the mid Sixties. Starting with Nixon’s “war” on drugs and extending through each successive president and their “czars,” both the Drug war’s budget and its human damage have been keeping pace with its hyperbole.
In reality, the policy Anslinger is remembered for is a sad commentary on human nature, a judgment now abundantly supported by history: the drug war’s evils are easily matched or exceeded by those of the Inquisition, American Chattel Slavery, the Holocaust, suicide bombings (whether Kamikaze or Jihadi) and a host of other follies subscribed to by members of our species.
When I first tumbled to what pot smokers could tell me, I became naively optimistic that simply repeating their histories to the “movement” would begin to turn US drug policy around. Little did I realize how quickly the same sectarian divisions that afflict all human organizations would become manifest. I now realize that “truth” has as many variants as colors have hues; thus every pot smoker (not to mention anyone who has never been high) has their own definition of “medical” vs “recreational” use.
What it adds up to is simply another variant of “truth:” beyond Al Gore’s “inconvenient” variety, I’m forced to be patient with its “incremental” variant. The good news is that we can be reasonably assured that the thread-bare nature of federal dogma is now so obvious that pot prohibition shouldn’t be the law of the land for much longer.
