Question

What are some of Anslinger’s lasting legacies?

Answer 1

Anslinger was the first head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the agency in charge of our nation’s drug enforcement from the beginning of cannabis prohibition in 1937 (its ignominious 80th anniversary approaches on August 2).

Anslinger held that post until 1962, by which time he had secured his crowning achievement, the adoption by most of the United Nations of the 1961 Single Convention Treaty on Narcotic Drugs – which included the worldwide adoption of America’s prohibition of cannabis.

One of Aslinger’s lasting legacies remains the use of penal law to condemn “The other people” whose skin, ethnicity, work, music, and smoking habits deferred from mainstream white AAmericans of European stock. His habit of supplying morphine to his addicted friend Senator Joseph McCarthy yields a revealing insight into his latent motivation, his animus was less against drugs than against ethnic differences. Aslinger’s dislike of these foreign elements in American society was intense. His condemnation of these deferring policies and cultures that he saw upsetting national homogeneity could be more powerful if they were labelled as sick or insane, transforming their cultural differences into pathologies. Aslinger’s marijuana users not only deferred from mainstream Americans but worse their work, behaviour, music showed them to be suffering from a dementia that if unchecked could affect the nation’s mainstream.