How a racist hate-monger masterminded America’s War on Drugs
Harry Anslinger conflated drug use, race, and music to criminalize non-whiteness and create a prison-industrial complex
In 1931, Henry Smith Williams walked into Harry Anslinger’s Washington, D.C., office to plead for his brother’s life. Anslinger and his agents had locked up every drug user they could find, including Williams’s brother, Edgar. Williams was a doctor and had written extensively on the need for humane treatment of addicts. He had spoken vehemently against Anslinger’s brutal tactics, but, confronted by the man himself — slicked back black hair, with a falcon-like visage, a thick neck, and an imposing frame — Williams was suddenly deflated. He half-heartedly made a few points about his brother not deserving such treatment; then he left. After he was out the door, Anslinger mocked him, calling him hysterical. “Doctors,” he said knowingly, “cannot treat addicts even if they wish to.” He called instead for “tough judges not afraid to throw killer-pushers into prison and throw away the key.”
With this unforgiving mentality, Anslinger ruled over the Federal Narcotics Bureau (a precursor to the DEA) for more than three decades — a formative period that shaped the United States’ drug policy for years to come. As John C. McWilliams explained in his book about Anslinger, The Protectors, “Anslinger was the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.” During this time, he implemented stringent drug laws and unreasonably long prison sentences that would give rise to America’s prison-industrial complex. Because of Anslinger, millions of lives were swept up in the drug war’s dragnet, if they weren’t outright ended. But Anslinger’s wasn’t so much a war on drugs as it was a war on culture, an attempt to squelch the radical freedom of the Jazz Age for people of color. Anslinger was a xenophobe with no capacity for intellectual nuance, and his racist views informed his work to devastating effect. But he couldn’t have done it, nor reigned as long as he did, without a cast of complicit politicians who shared his bigoted vision for what America should be.
Anslinger’s zeal for law and order manifested early. He was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1892 to Swiss German parents. His father struggled to find work as a barber and got hired by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was where Anslinger got his first job in the eighth grade. He eventually rose through the ranks by investigating wrongful death claims. His work was characterized by a distaste for anything extrajudicial, and a nose for fraud. This attitude proved useful when he pivoted to Prohibition enforcement. In the early 1920s, he worked for the government, chasing rum runners in the Bahamas. In 1930, he was appointed to helm the newly minted Federal Bureau of Narcotics by President Hoover. An astute judge of Washington’s ways, he quickly aligned himself with influential politicians, Washington insiders, and the pharmaceutical industry, whose support saw him through a series of scandals in the coming years. Congressman John Cochran of Missouri praised him, saying he “deserved a medal of honor.”
During the early parts of his career, Anslinger seemed little concerned about marijuana, known by most as cannabis. But when Prohibition ended, it looked as though Anslinger might be out of a job, so he sought a new threat to the American way, essentially manufacturing a drug war. As Johann Hari explains in his book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Anslinger’s office was focused on cocaine and heroin, but there were relatively small numbers of users. In order to ensure a promising future for his bureau, “he needed more,” Hari writes. Marijuana was Anslinger’s golden ticket. He used his office to trumpet the association between weed and violence, so that it could be criminalized. “You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother,” he was known to have said. McWilliams explains that in this effort, “Anslinger appealed to many organizations whose members were predominantly white Protestant.”
From the beginning, Anslinger conflated drug use, race, and music. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he was quoted as saying. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
As Hari writes: “Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, relaxed, free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. ‘It sounded,’ his internal memos said, ‘like the jungles in the dead of night.’”
When word got around in the late 1930s that Anslinger had referred to a black person as a “ginger-colored nigger,” Pennsylvania senator Joseph Guffey called for Anslinger to be fired. But these calls were dismissed, likely because of his influential Washington network.
In 1937, Anslinger wrote an article about the scourge of weed, titled “Marijuana, Assassin of Youth,” which appeared in The American Magazine. He began with the common white supremacist trope, trading on the idea that white women and children were in danger. “Not long ago the body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk after a plunge from a Chicago apartment window. Everyone called it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known to America as marijuana, and to history as hashish.” He also wrote of a “marijuana addict” hung for the “criminal assault” of a ten-year-old girl. Anslinger explained:
Those who first spread its use were musicians. They brought the habit northward with the surge of “hot” music demanding players of exceptional ability, especially in improvisation. Along the Mexican border and in southern seaport cities it had long been known that the drug has a strangely exhilarating effect upon the musical sensibilities. The musician who uses it finds that the musical beat seemingly comes to him quite slowly, thus allowing him to interpolate improvised notes with comparative ease. He does not realize that he is tapping the keys with a furious speed impossible for one in a normal state.
Anslinger found several cases where people had committed violent offenses purportedly while high, and presented them to Congress. The case that seemed to seal the deal was that of Victor Licata, a young Italian man who had hacked his family to death. Anslinger consulted 30 doctors to confirm his claim that weed was linked to violent crime. Of those, 29 said there was no connection, so he peddled the message of the one dissenting doctor to anyone who would listen.
Anslinger’s appeal to fear appeared to be working. Articles proclaiming the dangers of pot ran in papers all across the country. It was during this time that anti-drug zealots swapped the term “cannabis” for “marihuana” or “marijuana,” hoping that the Spanish word would conjure anti-Mexican sentiment. Newspapers, whether they believed it or not, went along for the ride, running headlines like “Murders Due to ‘Killer Drug’ Marihuana Sweeping the United States.” Anslinger’s efforts culminated in the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, which effectively made marijuana illegal.
Beginning in 1939, immediately following Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit,” Anslinger began ruthlessly targeting the singer for her purported heroin addiction. Given his undeniable racism, it’s difficult to believe that the campaign’s timing, so soon after the release of the haunting racial justice protest song, was a coincidence. From that day on, Anslinger’s agents hounded Holiday. As she was being transported to the hospital for a combination of drug and alcohol use, she said, “They are going to arrest me in this damn bed.” Holiday died not long after, and her friends blamed the stress of Anslinger’s campaign for her death.
Nine years later, Anslinger went after musicians again by trying to block the union membership of those with drug convictions. The lives of jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.” “Arrests involving a certain type of musician in marihuana cases are on the increase,” he wrote in a draft letter to the president of the American Federation of Musicians. In a hearing with the Ways and Means Committee, Anslinger repeated this refrain: “I am not talking about the good musicians, but the Jazz type.”
Over the coming years, Anslinger would have a decisive hand in all of the country’s drug legislation, including the Boggs Act of 1951, which required mandatory sentencing and various state laws further criminalizing drug use. According to McWilliams, Anslinger was considered the preeminent expert on drugs in America. He remained at the helm of the Federal Narcotics Bureau until the Kennedy administration, but his ideas were swiftly adopted by successive administrations — always disproportionately to the detriment of people of color.
In 1971, Nixon declared his “war on drugs.” His aide and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman later revealed the effort’s nefarious motivations in Harper’s:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people … We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
During the eighties, Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was paired with race-based media hysteria about crack. Over the course of the next 20 years, the number of drug offenders in U.S. prisons multiplied twelvefold. This draconian mantle was picked up by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and remained the status quo until Barack Obama, who began pardoning or commuting drug offenders’ sentences and approaching the opioid crisis as a public health issue rather than a carceral one. But with the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Anslinger’s legacy appears alive and well. This administration has attempted to block the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, urged police to be tough on drug crime, and called for harsher sentencing. As Sessions said in 2016, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
At Timeline, we reveal the forces that shaped America’s past and present. Our team and the Timeline community are scouring archives for the most visually arresting and socially important stories, and using them to explain how we got to now. To help us tell more stories, please consider becoming a Timeline member.
