Planting the Seeds of Marijuana Prohibition
By the late 1920s the existing drug regulation apparatus needed reform. In 1927 Congress reorganized the Bureau of Chemistry, the government’s most authoritative drug regulator, and renamed it the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration. This agency served as a new regulatory body and operated alongside its law enforcement peer, the Narcotics Commission, which was housed in the Bureau of Prohibition. In 1930 the name of the new regulatory body was shortened to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The year 1930 brought other, more dramatic, administrative changes. Congress passed H.R. 11143, the Porter Narcotic Bill, named after its sponsor, Congressman Stephen G. Porter (R-Pa.).4 This law closed the Narcotics Control Board and transferred all the powers of the Narcotics Commission from the Bureau of Prohibition to the new Bureau of Narcotics within the Treasury Department. It gave the bureau broad law enforcement jurisdiction over the control of narcotic drugs in the United States. That administrative change, and the personnel choices that followed, were significant and had lasting effects.
On the recommendation of Congressman Porter, President Herbert Hoover selected as the first commissioner of the newly established Bureau of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger, a veteran of the Bureau of Prohibition whose early career had focused primarily on enforcing laws banning alcohol under Prohibition.5 The new appointment allowed Anslinger to transfer the criminalization of alcohol to other substances.
Anslinger’s tenure began in late summer 1930 and lasted into the Kennedy administration. He may not have been America’s first drug warrior, but he was certainly among its most passionate and the one who had the greatest impact on drug policy in the twentieth century. He would play a central role in managing drug policy in the United States, ensuring that the power of the state and the specter of prohibition were ever expanding.
Commissioner Anslinger’s drug portfolio was broad, but he had a special interest in marijuana. His activities in service of his antimarijuana cause came to include touring the country and giving speeches to police groups, civic organizations, and others detailing the reasons marijuana was anathema. Anslinger engaged many of the same types of groups—women, police, local civic organizations—that composed the temperance movement, despite America’s failed experience with alcohol prohibition. In many ways the two movements functioned similarly. Like alcohol, marijuana was painted as a scourge on society, ruining the moral fabric of America, breaking up families, and decreasing Americans’ capacity for gainful employment.
Anslinger used or manipulated data to come up with creative statistics and compelling anecdotes. His publicly cited “statistics” likely were “generalized from arrest rates or, perhaps, simply guessed.”6 If his use of statistics was creative, his marijuana narrative was over the top. In one 1937 essay Anslinger wrote, “No one knows, when he places a marijuana cigarette to his lips, whether he will become a philosopher, a joyous reveler in a musical heaven, a mad insensate, a calm philosopher, or a murderer.”7 The essay is a stream of vignettes in which young people who use marijuana rob, rape, and murder strangers, police officers, and even members of their own families.
Racism became commonplace in Anslinger’s discussion of marijuana, including coded language such as “The cigarettes may have been sold by a hot tamale vendor” or “Marijuana found a ready welcome … in a closely congested section of New York.”8 Anslinger could also be more explicit in his insinuations: “Marijuana was introduced into the United States from Mexico, and swept across America with incredible speed.”9
This personal crusade combining scare tactics and racial overtones was quite effective at both the state and federal levels. Early in his tenure, Anslinger strongly supported passage of the Uniform State Narcotic Act of 1932 (its language had been drafted by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws), which pushed states both to unify their narcotics laws and to include cannabis under the “narcotic” designation. The act prescribed criminal punishments for those violating the laws at the state level.
Anslinger also was able to motivate Congress to act. In 1937 Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act (using the then-current spelling). It was the first time the federal government used the word in any formal context. This law required anyone who “imports, manufactures, produces, compounds, sells, deals in, dispenses, prescribes, administers, or gives away marihuana” to register with the government and purchase a tax stamp from the Department of Treasury. Failure to do so resulted in sometimes draconian fines and terms of imprisonment. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was an early U.S. government effort to criminalize all behavior involved in marijuana production. It would be just the beginning.
Prior to and during Anslinger’s reign atop of the Bureau of Narcotics, America’s approach to marijuana changed dramatically. In the years after the Mexican-American War (1846–48), as hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants streamed across the border, racial tensions heated up. As Americans sought a pretext to vilify this new immigrant community, they found an ideal culprit in marijuana, a more common crop south of the border and a substance used for a variety of purposes in Mexican culture at the time. Starting early in the twentieth century, fear and anti-immigrant sentiment prompted state-level bans on cannabis; this movement accelerated during Anslinger’s tenure and was harmonized after passage of the Uniform State Narcotic Act in 1932. While the federal government sought to tax and regulate drugs, states began outlawing them, particularly marijuana.
Although many Americans bought into Anslinger’s propaganda about the evils and dangers of marijuana, it failed to convince everyone. The passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 and subsequent regulatory legislation like the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 also met with some resistance, and some medical professionals, public officials, and politicians pushed back.10 The most notable, highest-profile challenge to Anslinger came from Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City who formed the La Guardia Committee to study the effects of marijuana in the United States and examine Anslinger’s claims. In 1944 the committee published the La Guardia Report. Compared to the information pouring out of the Bureau of Narcotics, the information contained in this report was stunning. It declared that marijuana was not addictive, that marijuana use was not motivating major crimes, and that use among children was not common. Ultimately, the report declared that “The publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York City is unfounded”—a clear rebuke of Anslinger.11
Anslinger was not pleased; the backlash was severe. As Martin Lee profiles in Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana—Medical, Recreational, and Scientific, Anslinger’s response was multifaceted. He called the La Guardia Report a “government-printed invitation to youth and adults—above all teenagers—to go ahead and smoke all the reefers they feel like. ” Anslinger also lobbied the American Medical Association and the American Pharmaceutical Association to publicly criticize the report, effectively neutering its impact.12 This was just one battle among many in the policy discussion around marijuana specifically and drugs more generally.
Some in the medical community sought to deal with marijuana users through treatment programs. In fact, the Porter Act explicitly directed the Surgeon General to create and administer treatment facilities for drug addicts. Others still felt that the most effective drug policy was a revenue-based regulatory system. For Anslinger, that was not enough—criminalization was the only option. Ultimately, criminalization won the day. To achieve this end, Anslinger constantly conveyed to Americans and, more important, to Congress the notion that marijuana use was widespread and growing and that the most effective strategy to deal with it was punishment. He scored victories before Congress in 1951 with the passage of the Boggs Act and in 1956 with the Narcotics Control Act. The Boggs Act set mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug law violators. The Narcotics Control Act increased those penalties. By the late 1950s, drugs, and in particular marijuana, were legal but very difficult to procure legally (through a doctor), and procuring pot illegally resulted in serious punishment. The criminalization of drugs in the United States was in force and Harry Anslinger was in command, continuing to push for stricter laws and peddling scare stories and statistics to advance his cause.
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Marijuana as an Enemy, Foreign and Domestic
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