motivated disputes with Chinese immigrants in the West. This act banned the import of opium and its derivatives into the United States. Over time the banning of opium imports would be expanded to other drugs.
In 1914 Congress passed the Harrison Act, named after its chief sponsor, Representative Francis Burton Harrison (D-N.Y.), which created a prescription registry and imposed a special tax of one dollar per year for anyone manufacturing, distributing, or dispensing opium and cocaine.2 It allowed the government to keep an account of prescriptions written for such substances and prescribed criminal penalties for doctors who violated the act by dispensing or possessing such substances without permission or without paying requisite taxes. In fact, doctors were prosecuted under this law. Physicians undertook efforts to have the law overturned on constitutional grounds, but a series of Supreme Court rulings upheld it.
These laws not only flexed the regulatory muscle of the U.S. government but also marked a period in American history in which drug control policy was executed through taxation. Criminalization of drug use did not come via prohibition of possession, distribution, or production. Instead, during this period criminal charges were pinned on those skirting tax requirements. This system reflects a type of government power still used today—the use of tax penalties or incentives to stimulate preferred behaviors. Tax policy can be an effective behavioral incentive in not requiring but spurring individuals to make specific choices that the government believes creates social benefits. People are allowed to purchase cigarettes, but the federal and state governments impose taxes in efforts both to generate revenue and to reduce use. Conversely, the government offers tax deductions for people who attend college, own a home, and make energy-efficient improvements to their dwellings.
In the case of drug policy, a taxation regime sought to raise revenue and incentivize certain behaviors among consumers and doctors; namely, doctors would no longer prescribe opium as a maintenance drug for those experiencing dependence.3 Much of the regulation of drugs during the early part of the twentieth century fell to the Bureau of Chemistry, but as drug control policy expanded in scope, the administrative state regulatory structure expanded as well. In 1922 the Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act (more commonly referred to as the Jones-Miller Act) established the Federal Narcotics Control Board and limited the importation of opium and cocaine into the United States except as authorized by the board (composed of the secretaries of state, treasury, and commerce). It expanded criminal penalties for illegal importation and put restrictions on the ability to export narcotic drugs.
At this time, opium was seen as a worldwide problem, and the Jones-Miller Act was passed to comply with the International Opium Convention (1912) that emerged from the First International Opium Conference (1912). Fears about addiction to opium were legitimate, but opium also elicited xenophobic fears about Asian immigrants and cultures. With this act, U.S. drug control policy began to shift away from an explicit taxation regime, as the early elements of drug prohibition were introduced.
Planting the Seeds of Marijuana Prohibition
By the late 1920s the existing drug regulation apparatus needed reform. In 1927 Congress reorganized the Bureau of Chemistry, the government’s most authoritative drug regulator, and renamed it the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration. This agency served as a new regulatory body and operated alongside its law enforcement peer, the Narcotics Commission, which was housed in the Bureau of Prohibition. In 1930 the name of the new regulatory body was shortened to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The year 1930 brought other, more dramatic, administrative changes. Congress passed H.R. 11143, the Porter Narcotic Bill, named after its sponsor, Congressman Stephen G. Porter (R-Pa.).4 This law closed the Narcotics Control Board and transferred all the powers of the Narcotics Commission from the Bureau of Prohibition to the new Bureau of Narcotics within the Treasury Department. It gave the bureau broad law enforcement jurisdiction over the control of narcotic drugs in the United States. That administrative change, and the personnel choices that followed, were significant and had lasting effects.
On the recommendation of Congressman Porter, President Herbert Hoover selected as the first commissioner of the newly established Bureau of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger, a veteran of the Bureau of Prohibition whose early career had focused primarily on enforcing laws banning alcohol under Prohibition.5 The new appointment allowed Anslinger to transfer the criminalization of alcohol to other substances.
Anslinger’s tenure began in late summer 1930 and lasted into the Kennedy administration. He may not have been America’s first drug warrior, but he was certainly among its most passionate and the one who had the greatest impact on drug policy in the twentieth century. He would play a central role in managing drug policy in the United States, ensuring that the power of the state and the specter of prohibition were ever expanding.
Commissioner Anslinger’s drug portfolio was broad, but he had a special interest in marijuana. His activities in service of his antimarijuana cause came to include touring the country and giving speeches to police groups, civic organizations, and others detailing the reasons marijuana was anathema. Anslinger engaged many of the same types of groups—women, police, local civic organizations—that composed the temperance movement, despite America’s failed experience with alcohol prohibition. In many ways the two movements functioned similarly. Like alcohol, marijuana was painted as a scourge on society, ruining the moral fabric of America, breaking up families, and decreasing Americans’ capacity for gainful employment.
Anslinger used or manipulated data to come up with creative statistics and compelling anecdotes. His publicly cited “statistics” likely were “generalized from arrest rates or, perhaps, simply guessed.”6 If his use of statistics was creative, his marijuana narrative was over the top. In one 1937 essay Anslinger wrote, “No one knows, when he places a marijuana cigarette to his lips, whether he will become a philosopher, a joyous reveler in a musical heaven, a mad insensate, a calm philosopher, or a murderer.”7 The essay is a stream of vignettes in which young people who use marijuana rob, rape, and murder strangers, police officers, and even members of their own families.
Racism became commonplace in Anslinger’s discussion of marijuana, including coded language such as “The cigarettes may have been sold by a hot tamale vendor” or “Marijuana found a ready welcome … in a closely congested section of New York.”8 Anslinger could also be more explicit in his insinuations: “Marijuana was introduced into the United States from Mexico, and swept across America with incredible speed.”9
This personal crusade combining scare tactics and racial overtones was quite effective at both the state and federal levels. Early in his tenure, Anslinger strongly supported passage of the Uniform State Narcotic Act of 1932 (its language had been drafted by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws), which pushed states both to unify their narcotics laws and to include cannabis under the “narcotic” designation. The act prescribed criminal punishments for those violating the laws at the state level.
Anslinger also was able to motivate Congress to act. In 1937 Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act (using the then-current spelling). It was the first time the federal government used the word in any formal context. This law required anyone who “imports, manufactures, produces, compounds, sells, deals in, dispenses, prescribes, administers, or gives away marihuana” to register with the government and purchase a tax stamp from the Department of Treasury. Failure to do so resulted in sometimes draconian fines and terms of imprisonment. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was an early U.S. government effort to criminalize all behavior involved in marijuana production. It would be just the beginning.
Prior to and during Anslinger’s reign atop of the Bureau of Narcotics, America’s approach to marijuana changed dramatically. In the years after the Mexican-American War (1846–48), as hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants streamed across the border, racial tensions heated up. As Americans sought a pretext to vilify this new immigrant community, they found an ideal culprit in marijuana, a more common crop south of the border and a substance used for a variety of purposes
