Harry Anslinger

Harry Jacob Anslinger (May 20, 1892 – November 14, 1975), first Commissioner of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, serving from the agency's creation in 1930 until 1962. He was the principal architect of federal cannabis prohibition. Appointed under his wife's uncle, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Anslinger transitioned from alcohol-Prohibition enforcement to building a permanent narcotics bureaucracy. He amassed the so-called "gore files" — sensational, often racially coded anecdotes linking cannabis to murder, insanity, and miscegenation — which he recycled before Congress, in magazines (notably "Marijuana: Assassin of Youth," 1937), and on radio. Historians John C. McWilliams (The Protectors, 1990), Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread (The Marijuana Conviction, 1974), and Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream, 2015) document his explicitly racial rhetoric, including the widely quoted remark that "reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men." Anslinger drafted the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, lobbied states to adopt the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act, supported the Boggs (1951) and Narcotic Control (1956) Acts, and helped export American prohibitionist norms through the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. His tenure fused moral panic, bureaucratic self-preservation, and racial ideology, shaping U.S. drug policy for decades after his retirement.