Anslinger became the first Commissioner of Narcotics in 1930, although he had had only sporadic contact with narcotic control.1 Nonetheless, his more than ten years of government experience affected his attitude toward law enforcement and addicts. Anslinger was born in 1892 in Altoona, Pennsylvania. His father worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and while Anslinger went to high school and then to Pennsylvania State College, he also worked for the railroad during the summers, doing maintenance and landscaping and occasionally investigating suspicious incidents for the railroad’s captain of police. Later, when the police captain became the state fire marshal, he offered Anslinger a job compiling statistics and investigating instances of suspected arson. In 1917, after the United States declared war on Germany, Anslinger was employed in Washington in the Ordinance Division of the War Department, where his chief task was to oversee government contracts. Ordinance officers were unpopular in Washington; the public expected young men to fight abroad and, when the opportunity came, Anslinger volunteered to the State Department which was looking for reliable German-speaking employees to work in Holland. He recalls being assigned Read more [...]

In late 1929 the League of Nations called for a new conference to consider how manufactured drugs might be better controlled.7 The State Department wanted to participate but it faced Representative Porter’s objection that participation might imply that the United States had shifted its stand from demanding a limit on raw production to the secondary issue of manufacturing, the issue which had led to Porter’s departure from Geneva in 1925. Finally, Porter was persuaded to permit John T. Caldwell of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs to be present at the Advisory Committee meetings in early 1930 which would consider a preliminary conference to be held in London later that year — provided that Caldwell took no part in the preparations. At the preliminary conference in October and November eleven nations discussed a plan for estimating their requirements for manufactured narcotic drugs and a means by which the manufacturers could divide the market. Although agreement was not reached then, the following May, at the Geneva Conference on the Limitation of the Manufacture of Narcotic Drugs, fifty-seven nations agreed on a Convention. The American delegation consisted of Caldwell as chairman, two other federal officials Read more [...]

Social reformers successfully initiated federal restrictions on cannabis along with alcohol, opiates, cocaine, and chloral hydrate in the first decade of this century. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 required that any quantity of cannabis, as well as several other dangerous substances, be clearly marked on the label of any drug or food sold to the public.8 Early drafts of federal antinarcotic legislation, which finally emerged as the Harrison Act in 1914, also repeatedly listed the drug along with opiates and cocaine. Cannabis, however, never survived the legislative gauntlet, probably because of the pharmaceutical industry’s opposition. At that time, and for at least a decade longer, the drug trades saw no reason why a substance used chiefly in corn plasters, veterinary medicine, and nonintoxicating medicaments should be so severely restricted. Not even the reformers claimed, in the pre-World War I hearings and debates over a federal antinarcotic act, that cannabis was a problem of any major significance in the United States. Congress rarely heard any witness defend opiates or cocaine, but during the January 1911 hearings on a federal antinarcotic law before the House Ways and Means Committee, the National Wholesale Read more [...]

Fear of cannabis, or marihuana, as it was beginning to be known, was minimal throughout most of the nation in the 1920s. Nevertheless it still concerned the federal government. For example, in the January 1929 authorization of the two narcotic centers for the treatment of addicted federal prisoners, the law specifically defined “habit-forming narcotic drugs” to include “Indian hemp” and made habitual cannabis users, along with opium addicts, eligible for treatment.16 Although there seem to have been few cannabis users transferred to Lexington and Fort Worth, it is significant that congressional worry about cannabis continued after passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and clearly was present before the Bureau of Narcotics was established in 1930. In areas with concentrations of Mexican immigrants, who tended to use marihuana as a drug of entertainment or relaxation, the fear of marihuana was intense. During the 1920s Mexican immigration, legal and illegal, rapidly increased into the region from Louisiana to California and up to Colorado and Utah. Mexicans were useful in the United States as farm laborers and, as the economic boom continued, they traveled to the Midwest and the North where jobs in factories and sugar-beet Read more [...]

During its first few years, the bureau, as judged from its annual reports, minimized the marihuana problem and felt that control should be vested in the state governments.24 The report published in 1932 commented, This abuse of the drug is noted among the Latin-American or Spanish-speaking population. The sale of cannabis cigarettes occurs to a considerable degree in States along the Mexican border and in cities of the Southwest and West, as well as in New York City, and, in fact, wherever there are settlements of Latin Americans. A great deal of public interest has been aroused by newspaper articles appearing from time to time on the evils of the abuse of marijuana or Indian hemp, and more attention has been focused upon specific cases reported of the abuse of the drug than would otherwise have been the case. This publicity tends to magnify the extent of the evil and lends color to an inference that there is an alarming spread of the improper use of the drug, whereas the actual increase in such use may not have been inordinately large. In 1932 the Federal Bureau of Narcotics strongly endorsed the new Uniform State Narcotic Act and repeatedly stressed that the problem could be brought under control if all the states Read more [...]

Anslinger went to New York in January 1936 to meet with a group of distinguished experts to try to hammer out a marihuana control bill; present were a representative of the Foreign Policy Association; Joseph Chamberlain, professor of law at Columbia; Herbert L. May, member of the Permanent Central [opium] Board of the League of Nations; and Stuart Fuller, assistant chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs of the State Department. Anslinger reported their conclusion to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Stephen B. Gibbons in a confidential memorandum: “under the taxing power and regulation of interstate commerce it would be almost hopeless to expect any kind of adequate control.”30 The Commissioner’s recommendation for the marihuana legislation was to follow the example of the Migratory Bird Act, which had been declared constitutional, although it intruded into the police powers of the states, because it had been enacted as a requirement of treaties with Canada and Mexico (Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416). Anslinger suggested a similar treaty requiring the control of marihuana. Once the treaty was ratified by the Senate, a federal marihuana law would not meet the constitutional blocks he felt sure it would Read more [...]

In January 1912 Wright returned to the United States with two goals: increasing the number of signatories to the Convention and dispelling any doubt that this nation would pass the necessary domestic legislation. Southern resistance to any invasion of states’ rights made Democratic control of the House especially significant for the narcotic reformers. Representative Francis Burton Harrison, a well-born Tammany Democrat, agreed to shepherd the antinarcotic legislation through the House. Harrison’s task was to assure his colleagues that the various trade interests and concerned parties had achieved a generally acceptable narcotic bill or at least one that would engender no unyielding hostility. He did not display as much interest in the specific form or philosophy of the legislation as in its political viability. Strongly backed by such adamant reformers as Drs. Harvey Wiley, Alexander Lambert, and William Schieffelin, Dr. Wright believed that the legislative goal should be elimination of narcotics except for medical purposes. As a result, the first Harrison bill in the 62nd Congress did not differ greatly from the ill-fated Foster bill of 1910.1 It contained no provision for exempting small amounts of narcotics in Read more [...]

Believing that the movement to control narcotics was gaining strength and that some legislation was likely to be enacted, the American Pharmaceutical Association sought to give the various components of the drug trades a united voice, or at least a forum, in which the interests of each would receive the maximum possible support of the others. Meeting in Denver during October 1912, the association called for a convocation. As a result, the National Drug Trade Conference (NDTC) was created and met in Washington, D.C., on 15 January 1913, with its chief business the proposed antinarcotic bill. Each major trade association was permitted three representatives, and no resolution could be passed unless it was unanimous.2 This set of rules worked relatively well for the problem at hand because pressure from outside forces was considerable. During the three-day meeting, constituent members were able to compromise on a common position. In later years, however, and on other subjects, the NDTC reached unanimity less often. All groups opposed the Harrison bill as it then stood. The American Association of Pharmaceutical Chemists and the National Association of Medicinal Products (NAMP), both makers of prescription drugs, were Read more [...]

The AMA’s role in narcotic legislation reflected its stage of institutional development. By 1913 the American Medical Association, from a relatively small group centered mostly in the eastern states, was well on its way to consolidation of American medical practitioners. Like the American Pharmaceutical Association, it represented a group desire to strengthen the education and raise the status of physicians. Although founded in 1847, it did not begin its period of rapid growth and powerful influence until this century. Membership increased from 8,500 in 1900 to 36,000 in 1913, and to more than 44,000 by 1920. The American Medical Association realized the need to enter into political activity in order to achieve its professional goals. It maintained surveillance on laws affecting its interest at each political level. The battle for the Pure Food and Drug Act in the first decade of the century whetted the AMA’s legislative weapons, and from then on it knew when, how, and whom to contact in the state, local, or federal echelon involved. The Council on Health and Public Instruction, created in 1910, contained within it the Bureau of Legislation, headed by Dr. Woodward. This bureau was permitted to use its discretion in Read more [...]

The presidency of Woodrow Wilson began in March 1913, with Democrats now in control of both Houses. Initially Wright was delighted with this change. Wilson and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan supported strict regulation of narcotics and seemed to have nothing but admiration for America’s initiative in international control. Wright gave a glowing report of his first meetings with Bryan. According to Wright, his account of the fight for worldwide narcotic control was repeatedly punctuated by Bryan’s amazed exclamation: “How did you manage it?”16 A joint committee set up by the State and Treasury Departments attempted to write a bill acceptable to the drug trades, the medical profession, and the Internal Revenue Bureau, which would have enforcement responsibility. Wright felt he was close to the end of a three-year fight with trade interests. At last, on 10 June 1913, the chairman of the National Drug Trade Conference signed a draft of the bill, which was then introduced into the first session of the 63rd Congress by Harrison as HR 6282, destined for eventual passage as the Harrison Act.17 The descendant of the stricter Foster bill, the Harrison bill of 1913 had incorporated numerous compromises. Records Read more [...]