Biography Becomes Policy: How Cannabis Became Demonized
It’s not so much what happens to us. What matters is how we get through it and move on. If we don’t, our biography can become our biology and manifest as disease. I will go so far as to say our biography can become our policy. Take the case of Harry Anslinger, this country‘s first drug czar. I offer a few events that helped shape his policy for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, formally known as the Department of Prohibition. That department is known today as the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Harry was the eighth of nine children born into a world where drugs were readily available. You could go to pharmacies and buy medications containing derivatives of heroin and cocaine. His Swiss father and German mother immigrated from Switzerland with the family. By the time he was 12 years old, he was visiting a neighbor’s farm house in Pennsylvania. He heard a scream come from upstairs. A woman howled like an animal. Her husband ran downstairs and told Harry, “take my horse and cart to town as fast as you can. Pick up this package from the pharmacy and bring it here. Now!” Harry did as he was told and quickly returned with the drugs. The farmer ran and gave them to his wife. The screaming stopped. Harry would write in his journal years later, “I never forgot those screams “. He became convinced that there were normal looking people amongst us who could any moment become “emotional, hysterical, degenerate, mentally deficient and vicious “if exposed to drugs. Harry knew from that day at the farm house that his life‘s mission would be to rid the earth of drugs.
As a young man, Harry went on to be a diplomatic agent in World War I, given his fluency in German. He had been turned down for active-duty because he was blind in one eye from a childhood injury. He was then deployed to the Bahamas in 1926 at the height of alcohol prohibition. Harry was disgusted with the Americans who wanted to drink and the West Indian and Central American smugglers who were all too happy to satisfy their thirst. Harry wrote the bootleggers were “loathsome and full of contagious diseases”. He told his superiors he could make prohibition work with the help of the Navy to guard our coasts, increased prison time and banning alcohol for medical purposes. Harry took his position as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics with a loathing for drugs, alcohol and people of color
For several years, newspaper headlines often talked about marijuana turning entire families insane. Initially, Harry did not give marijuana the same importance as heroin and cocaine. However, he mistakenly believed that Mexican immigrants and African-Americans were using more marijuana than white people. He told the House Committee on Appropriations that “colored students at the University of Minnesota are partying with white female students and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution resulting in pregnancies”. In an unrelated case, he went so far as to refer to a suspect in a memo on official Bureau letterhead as a “nigger”. The case of Victor Lacata would solidify Harry’s position as this country’s protector. He was a 21-year-old Floridian allegedly known to the neighborhood as “a sane, rather quiet young man” until the day he smoked marijuana. On that day he took an ax and hacked his mother, father, two brothers and sister to pieces. Mass hysteria ensued, fanned by Harry and William Randolph Hearst, a media mogul who was the Rupert Murdoch of that time. Years later, it would be found that Victor Lacata had a long history of mental illness, as did several people in his family. Three were committed to insane asylums. Local police tried to get him committed for years but his parents insisted they could take care of him at home. The psychiatrist who examined him felt his marijuana use was irrelevant.
The prohibition of alcohol failed miserably. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ budget was cut. However, with Harry’s manipulation of the headlines and suppression of the scientific community regarding marijuana, the bureau was given a new life. Harry received all the resources he requested to rid the world of drugs. The strategy of fear of the other worked then and continues to be just as effective today. The war on drugs Harry started has continued for over 100 years and counting. The little boy in Harry never forgot that woman’s screams and he fought to eradicate drugs from this earth until he was removed from office over three decades later.
