Anslinger became the first Commissioner of Narcotics in 193o, 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 cosnpiling 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 to "check up on . . . and straighten out" the indirect American contacts with the Kaiser in order to let the German ruler know that President Wilson wanted him to stay on after the war, but Anslinger failed, obtaining from the whole episode only the Kaiser's field utility kit which he later gave to the Smithsonian. In 1921 he took the necessary examinations and was appointed to the rank of vice-consul.

After the war, from posts in The Hague and in Hamburg, Anslinger sent many reports to the State Department warning them of trouble to come from Russia, but he was discouraged by the lack of interest in the State Department which, he concluded, con-sidered the Bolshevik menace a myth. Almost no one believed his frequent reports, although he was able to get important information from an informer in the Third International, held in Amsterdam in 1920. Bolsheviks were being signed on as seamen on freighters and were spreading propaganda across the world. In Hamburg he learned that seamen on American-bound ships were being bribed to smuggle narcotics into the United States.

Much to his regret, and in spite of the anti-Bolshevik intelligence work which he believed was of great value, he was sent as consul to La Guaira, Venezuela, a hot and lazy place. He wondered whether he had been mistaken in choosing foreign service as a career. But two years later his interest and ability in intelligence work, now focused on rum-running in the Caribbean, was rewarded by a tem-porary assignment to the Bahamas where he was asked to find a way to stop the smuggling of liquor into the United States. He persuaded the British to establish landing certificates which would keep a record of all ship movements. The Treasury Department considered this a remarkable accomplishment and Anslinger was, at the Treasury's request, detailed temporarily to the Prohibition Unit, where he soon became chief of the Foreign Control Section.

In 1929, tvvo years after the unit had achieved bureau status, Anslinger became an Assistant Commissioner of Prohibition. His field experience in enforcement was limited; most of his valued work was at a higher level, but he had definite views on how to repair the flagging effectiveness of a statute like the Volstead Act. In 1928 Anslinger had entered a national competition on how best to en-force the 18th Amendment and prepared a comprehensive program to resuscitate the drive against illicit alcohol.2 Although by that time the object of Prohibition as well as its mode of enforcement had become unpopular, he believed that the right sort of remedy could save the situation.

He suggested ways in which smuggling could be prevented through international agreements. He recommended that Prohibition investigations be made by the Justice Department rather than the Treasury and that additional federal attorneys and judges be appointed to expedite prosecutions; and that a coordinating director be appointed with authority to demand cooperation from the various Prohibition enforcement agencies.

The most interesting feature of Anslinger's proposals relates to penalties. The federal Prohibition laws made it a crime to sell, manufacture, or transport liquor for sale, but purchase of liquor was not a crime. Anslinger would have made the purchase of alcohol for nonmedical consumption a violation, and for the first conviction would set a penalty of a fine of not less than $1,000 and imprisonment for not less than six months. For a second or subsequent offense the fine would be between $5,000 and $50,000 and imprisonment for two to five years. In his view these penalties would put teeth into the law and greatly discourage violations. President Hoover did increase the enforcement effectiveness, although not by prohibiting purchase, and a much higher conviction rate was achieved. If a law was wrong, Hoover said, its rigid enforcement was the surest guarantee of its repeal; if it was right, its enforcement was the quickest method of compelling respect.

When Levi Nutt's leadership became awkward for the Treasury, Anslinger was promoted to head temporarily the Narcotic Division. Within a few months he was appointed the first federal Commissioner of Narcotics. There is no evidence that during Anslinger's tenure as commissioner he ever changed his mind that the most effective way of gaining public compliance with a law regulating a dangerous drug was a policy of high fines and severe mandatory prison sentences for first convictions. While the public did not agree with this attitude for liquor prohibition, it did support the policy in regard to narcotic control, thanks in part to propaganda like that spread by Richmond Hobson.

In the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger's opinions on how best to put teeth into the law met with almost no objection. He rarely found himself curbed by the administrations under which he worked; he was in fact encouraged not to deviate from stringent enforcement. Early in Roosevelt's first administration Anslinger recalls a visit from the President's close adviser Louis Howe, who made it clear to Anslinger that should he ever forward to the White House a recommendation for clemency for a drug pusher, he could attach his resignation to it. That intelligence, Howe said, "came from the Boss." In the late thirties when a congressman from Washington State, perhaps inspired by the White Cross, argued in the House of Representatives for an investigation into the FBN and its style of enforcement, he received no effective support from his congressional colleagues.3 In 1951 a mandatory minimum tvvo-year sentence for first convictions of narcotic possession became law. Five years later the federal penalty for the sale of heroin by someone over age 18 to a buyer under 18 was raised to death at the jury's discretion.4 Given the prevalent attitude toward narcotic addiction and pushers, Anslinger's views were in harmony with most of those citizens who were responsible for legislation or executive action. Although his accession as commissioner in 1930 was accidental, and his views on control harsh, Anslinger's views were not unusual.

The consistency of Anslinger's position may seem to imply that his experience with Prohibition had created too rigid an attitude toward drug abusers but the failure and demise of Prohibition taught him lessons which he carefully followed in his long tenure in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Among the first was the risk to any agency that meddled with the personal lives of citizens. Interviews with former Prohibition officers revealed a fear of federal judges, particularly in the dry era, who were angered by the large numbers of "ordinary citizens" hauled into court on minor liquor violations. Anslinger realized that similar judicial displeasure might follow if too many marihuana possession cases were taken to federal courts. He much preferred to have violators brought before local courts by the local police. Naturally this desire to keep within the good graces of the courts caused the FBN to seek control of only the most obviously dangerous drugs—cocaine and opiates. Anslinger "put sandbags up against the door" whenever anyone suggested that the FBN police barbiturates and amphetamines, for example, because the gray areas meant trouble and perhaps bureaucratic suicide for an enforcement agency with a small budget and staff.

Since both liquor prohibition and narcotic controls were directed at medicinal substances, the AMA, after World War I, resented the curbs placed on physicians—the medical profession was no more trusted in the discharge of its responsibilities to the 18th Amendment than it was in regard to the Harrison Act. A specific law, the Willis-Campbell Act of November 1921, was enacted in order to limit the number of liquor prescriptions permitted each doctor. The similarity of die Willis-Campbell Aces restraints to the contemporary Court interpretation of the Harrison Act is obvious, and the physicians' response, led in the House of Representatives by Congressman Volk, became equally loud.5 Yet large segments of the medical profession were in sympathy with Prohibition. An AMA poll in 192.1 revealed that almost 60 percent of the thirty thousand respondents stated that physicians should be restricted in their alcohol prescriptions; among those wanting curbs, "a large majority favor such restrictions as . . . under the Harrison Narcotic Law." 6

Sanitariums often treated both narcotic and alcohol addicts; Charles B. Towns was only one operator in the 1920s who claimed great success with both kinds of patients. Yet among most physicians there was little optimism for the cure of alcoholism by any means other than keeping alcohol away from consumers, which was exactly what Prohibition attempted to do. The same kind of inter-diction was adopted against narcotic users by the federal government. If the claim was made that alcoholism and narcotism were diseases, the government could claim that neither could be "cured" except by keeping the substance away from the "patients."

One further lesson the FBN learned from the Prohibition era was the great assistance citizen groups could offer a federal enforcement agency. The Anti-Saloon League and the WCTU had lobbied effec-tively. Anslinger remembers these groups and others like them with appreciation, recalling that opposition to Narcotic Bureau policies would be effectively met at times by giving the word to the WCTU or the General Federation of Women's Clubs, who would then oppose election of public officials who criticized the bureau's en-forcement measures. For example, a son of the friend of a Maryland state legislator was arrested in the 1930s for possession of marihuana and sentenced to several years in prison. The legislator attempted to lessen the state penalties against marihuana, but cued by a Word of warning from the FBN, the WCTU and the Federation of Women's Clubs appeared at the committee hearing when the bill came up and killed it then and there. These aggressive lay groups had gained experience in political lobbying over other issues from women's suffrage to Prohibition. They were welcomed by the FBN and in the mid-1930s they eagerly took up the battle against marihuana, the new menace to America's schoolchildren.

Two years after the FBN achieved bureau status its development was arrested by the Depression. The FBN's appropriations were cut by Congress and at times the Administration held annual expenditures even below the sums appropriated. The House Appropriations Committee examined the most minute details of the FBN's annual appropriation request and the matter of a few thousand dollars often required careful documentation for approval. The number of agents began to decline, and the bureau entered a decade of low budgets, averaging to 1.3 million dollars annually. This limitation obviously affected enforcement. Publicity and warnings became the methods of control, complementing careful examination of the thousands of physicians' and druggists' records.

INTERNATIONAL ANTI-NARCOTIC ACTIVITIES, 1930-1936

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—Anslinger and Dr. Walter L. Treadway, head of the Mental Hygiene Division of the Public Health Service—and Sanford Young of the California Legislature. No congressman was named to the group; the State Department took pains that no member of congress should again assume Porter's role.

The State Department and most other observers believed that the Narcotics Limitation Convention embodied a number of improvements over previous international agreements. Criticism came chiefly from the Hearst press which referred to the American delegation's use of quieter and more congenial diplomacy in such derogatory headlines as "Britain Leading America by the Nose," and "Caldwell Backed Down."

The Convention divided drugs into two schedules, according to the hazards attached to their use. An annual estimate for scientific and medical needs of manufactured drugs was required of each signatory, and the manufacturers of each nation 'agreed to keep within that quota, or less if some of the quota was imported. A supervisory body would examine the estimates and, for nations which did not comply, make an independent estimate. Heroin could not be exported except at the request of the importing nation. Careful recording and reporting of all raw materials would be required. One of Porter's goals, a separate narcotic agency in each government, was requested. The several administrations were not only intended to regulate the trade in drugs and apply the Convention but were also expected to organize campaigns against drug addiction. The United States strongly favored this agreement and the Senate unanimously approved it on 31 March 1932. The Convention came into effect on 9 July 1933.

One of the advantages to American ratification was that a legal basis now existed for American cooperation with the League. The United States took a more cooperative role in the opium affairs of the League and contributed funds to support the Opium Advisory Committee. By the beginning of World War II the United States was an advocate of the League's antiopium activities.

The last international meeting before the war, which had significance for the domestic control of narcotics, was held in June 1936, the Conference for the Suppression of the Illicit Traffic in Dangerous Drugs. Its purpose was to improve detection and provide for more certain punishment of narcotic law violators. The United States until the last moment maintained that prevailing conventions and its bilateral treaties with various nations were sufficient, and that an additional convention would not facilitate the location* and conviction of violators. Yet when the conference was formally announced in February 1936, the United States decided to attend, a new motivation having arisen: the possibility of securing a con-vention that would mandate domestic control of marihuana and opium-poppy cultivation.

FEDERAL CONTROL OF CANNABIS, 1906-1920

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 Whole-sale Druggists' Association's representative protested the inclusion of cannabis alongside opiates and cocaine. Charles A. West, chairman of the NWDA legislative committee, testified that cannabis was not what might be called a habit-forming drug. Albert Plaut, representing the New York City pharmaceutical firm of Lehn and Fink, also objected to the inclusion of cannabis: he attributed its reputation more to literary fiction, such as the description of hashish in the Count of Monte Cristo, than to informed opinion. When questioned whether cannabis might be taken by those whose regular supply of opiates or cocaine was restricted, Plaut responded that the effects of cannabis were so different from those of opiates and cocaine that he would not expect an addict to find cannabis attractive.9

The drug industry's complaints received stern rebuttals, but no one denied that cannabis then constituted a very small part of the drug abuse spectrum. Arguments for including it rested on the belief of such authorities as Lambert, Towns, and Wiley, that the drug was habit forming. One of the most stirring attacks on cannabis came from Towns:

To iny mind it is inexcusable for a man to say that there is no habit from the use of that drug. There is no drug in the Pharmacopoeia today that would produce the pleasurable sensations you would get from cannabis, no not one—absolutely not a drug in the Pharmacopoeia today, and of all the drugs on earth I would certainly put that on the list.10

While most spokesmen for the drug trades opposed federal regulation of cannabis, one distinguished member favored its control and most of the other provisions of the new legislation: Dr. William Jay Schieffelin of New York, who moved with the progressive and reform spirit of the era and was therefore somewhat apart from the rank and file of his colleagues in the drug trade. Schieffelin believed that cannabis was "used only to a slight extent in this country," but he had heard that there was a demand for it in the Syrian colony in New York, where he thought it was smoked like prepared opium. He concluded that the evil was small but that cannabis ought to be included in the bill.11

But cannabis was not included finally, and except for the Pure Food and Drug Act's provision for labeling, no federal regulatory law was enacted until 1937. Meanwhile the two contrasting attitudes toward cannabis remained pretty much the same—the reformers feared its use; the drug industry felt less concern about possible misuse and opposed its regulation.

Still, complaints about cannabis continued to come to the attention of the federal government. One of the American delegates to the First Hague Conference, Henry Finger, drew particular attention: Californians, especially in San Francisco, were frightened by the "large influx of Hindoos . . . demanding cannabis indica," who were initiating "the whites into their habit." Finger wanted the world traffic in cannabis to be controlled.12 The United States delegation gladly adopted Finger's goal but did not find the Hague Conference favorably disposed. The best the United States could accomplish was the adoption of a recommendation that other nations look into the character of the drug."13 Agreement that international traffic in cannabis should be regulated did not come "until the Second Geneva Convention in 1925.14

Domestic concern over cannabis seemed to originate in the South-west and to begin increasing after World War I. John M. Parker, governor of Louisiana, and Dr. Oscar Dowling, president of Louisiana's Board of Health, argued that cannabis also ought to be controlled. Their reaction to marihuana had elements which would become familiar in the 1930s. A white, 21-year-old musician in New Orleans had been arrested for forging a physician's signature in order to get some "mariguana" imported from Mexico. The musician said the substance was taken to "make you feel good," but its dangers seemed clear to Dowling and Parker. Dowling warned the governor that marihuana was "a powerful narcotic, causing exhilaration, intoxication, delirious hallucinations, and its subsequent actions, drowsiness and stupor." He also urgently requested of the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service that the federal government take "some action" to control the traffic in marihuana.15 On 26 November 1920 Governor Parker wrote to Prohibition Commissioner John F. Kramer that "two people were killed a few days ago by the smoking of this drug, which seems to make them go crazy and wild," and he expressed his surprise that there were no restrictions against marihuana. But the trouble the government was already having with enforcing the Harrison Act did not encourage the bureau to take on the policing of more drugs.

RISING DOMESTIC FEAR OF CANNABIS, 1920-1934

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 fields were available.17

Although employers welcomed them in the twenties, Mexicans were also feared as a source of crime and deviant social behavior. As early as 1919 federal officials were reporting that marihuana was a cause of violence among Mexican prisoners in the southwestern states.18 By the mid-twenties horrible crimes were attributed to marihuana and its Mexican purveyors. Legal and medical officers in New Orleans began studies of the evil and within a few years published articles claiming that many of the region's crimes could be traced to marihuana, for they believed it was a sexual stimulant that removed civilized inhibitions.19 As a result, requests were made to include marihuana in the Harrison Act.

When the Great Depression settled over America, the Mexicans, who had been welcomed by at least a fraction of the communities in which they lived, became an unwelcome surplus in regions devastated by unemployment. Cotton, fruit, and vegetable growers in the Southwest and sugar-beet farmers in Colorado, Michigan, Montana, and the Northwest favored further immigration, but the American Federation of Labor understandably sought strict barriers. Another group that worked energetically for an end to Mexican immigration did so for social reasons, afraid that mixture with an inferior race was causing race suicide. Citizens anxious to preserve what they believed valuable in American life banded together into "Allied Patriotic Societies," "Key Men of America," or the group which united many of these associations, the "American Coalition," whose goal was to keep America American.20 One of the prominent members of the American Coalition, C. M. Goethe of Sacramento, saw marihuana and the problem of Mexican immigrants as closely connected:

Marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration. Easily grown, it has been asserted that it has recently been planted be-tween rows in a California penitentiary garden. Mexican peddlers have been caught distributing sample marijuana cigarets to school children. Bills for our quota against Mexico have been blocked mysteriously in every Congress since the 1924 Quota Act. Our nation has more than enough laborers.21

Southwestern police and prosecuting attorneys likewise protested constantly to the federal government about the Mexicans' use of the weed.

In 1934 Dr. Walter Bromberg, a respected researcher, informed a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association that some authors had estimated the number of marihuana smokers in the southern states to be one out of four.22 Dr. Bromberg, who did not subscribe to the alarm over marihuana displayed by some writers, nevertheless told of its spread from the South to New York and to other large cities. Although asserting that it was something like alcohol in its effect, nevertheless, on the basis of good physiological and psychological studies of cannabis, he was persuaded that it was "a primary stimulus to the impulsive life with direct expression in the motor field. [It] releases inhibitions and restraints imposed by society and allows individuals to act out their drives openly [and] acts as a sexual stimulant [particularly to] overt homosexuals."

Dr. Bromberg's description of marihuana in 1933 differed in quality from the writings, for example, of New Orleans' Prosecuting Attorney, who in 1931 fearfully portrayed marihuana leading to crime.23 Neither the New Orleans studies, which began at least in the late 1920s, nor Dr. Bromberg's research can be ascribed to any campaign by the FBN for a federal marihuana law. It is reasonable to assume that in the first few years of the 1930s marihuana was knovvn among police departments and civic leaders, particularly those in association with Mexican immigrants, and even among scientific investigators, as a drug with dangerous possibilities. This situation led naturally to pressure on the federal government to take some action. What was the attitude of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics to the growing concern over marihuana?

PRELUDE TO FEDERAL MARIHUANA CONTROL, 1935-1937

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 FBN strongly endorsed the new Uniform State Narcotic Act and repeatedly stressed that the problem could be brought under control if all the states adopted it.25 As late as January 1937, Commissioner Anslinger was quoted as advising that the distribution of marihuana was an intrastate problem and that hope for its ultimate control lay in adoption of uniform narcotic laws.26 The annual reports spent an increasing amount of space on marihuana-associated crime after 1935, but the bureau continued to recommend the uniform act. There seem to be several reasons why the FBN delayed advocating a federal marihuana law.

Commissioner Anslinger recalled that marihuana caused few problems except in the southwestern and western states, and there the growing alarm was directed at the Mexicans who the "sheriffs and local police departments claimed got loaded on the stuff and caused a lot of trouble, stabbing, assaults, and so on." These states were "the only ones then affected . . . we didn't see it here in the East at all at that time." To Anslinger, the danger of marihuana did not compare with that of heroin, and after the Act's passage in 1937 he warned his agents to keep their eyes on heroin; if an agent was making arrests for marihuana possession, he was told to get back to "the hard stuff."

In addition to questioning whether a federal law would significantly ameliorate the so-called marihuana problem, the commissioner also doubted the possibility of a law that would be constitutional. But enactment in 1934 of a "transfer tax" on certain firearms gave the Treasury's General Counsel Herman Oliphant a constitutional solution. In an effort to reduce the use of machine guns by gangsters, Congress decreed that such firearms could be transferred only upon payment of a transfer tax ( National Firearms Act). As peculiar as this tax may seem, it was held constitutional by the Supreme Court in March 1937.27 Oliphant, according to Anslinger, decided that this model could be applied to the transfer of marihuana, and within a month of the Supreme Court's decision the Treasury Department appeared before Congress requesting enactment of a marihuana transfer tax. When the idea of such a tax was first broached to Anslinger by the General Counsel, he thought the notion was "ridiculous." Even after the decision was made to recommend it to Congress Anslinger did not believe it would pass.

The Bureau had avoided control of barbiturates and amphetamines, which would be very difficult to implement. Such an attitude was consistent with Anslinger's disinclination to take on marihuana, which grew, as the Commissioner ruefully pointed out in 1936, "like dandelions," and had a few legitimate uses.28 It is significant that when marihuana was finally controlled by the federal government, it was outlawed for almost every use except in birdseed, where it was permitted only if first sterilized. The regulations for its use by physicians were so complicated that they are not likely to have prescribed it since 1937.

The pressure for a federal antimarihuana law was political, Anslinger states, from local police forces in affected states to the governors; from the governors to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr.; from Morgenthau to the Treasury's General Counsel; and finally to the Commissioner of Narcotics. Apparently the decision to seek a federal law was made in 1935, since by January 1936 Anslinger was holding conferences to that end. The bureau's search for grounds on which to base a federal law was almost unsuccessful. It first claimed that only the treaty-making power of the federal government could sustain an antimarihuana statute. Such a treaty was then attempted, but with an appeal to other nations which had almost no chance of success. The bureau had performed faithfully the task it had been given and the effort was about to fall short, when, Anslinger claims, the Treasury's General Counsel ingeniously applied the transfer tax.

The pressure on the Treasury could well have been sufficient to induce the ingenuity, as the following letter of 1936 from the editor of the Alamosa, Colorado, Daily Courier suggests:

Is there any assistance your Bureau can give us in handling this drug? Can you suggest campaigns? Can you enlarge your Department to deal with marijuana? Can you do anything to help us?

I wish I could show you what a small marijuana cigarette can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That's why our problem is so great: the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of whom are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions.

While marijuana has figured in the greatest number of crimes in the past few years, officials fear it, not for what it has done, but for what it is capable of doing. They want to check it before an outbreak does occur.

Through representatives of civic leaders and law officers of the San Luis Valley, I have been asked to write to you for help.29

THE MARIHUANA TAX ACT

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 face if it were based on federal tax or commerce powers. Otherwise, the memorandum went on, the various details that imperiled simple prohibition of marihuana were nearing solution:

The State Department has tentatively agreed to this proposition, but before action is taken we shall have to dispose of certain phases of legitimate traffic: for instance, the drug trade still has a small medical need for marijuana, but has agreed to eliminate it entirely. The only place it is used extensively is by the veterinarians, and we can satisfy them by importing their medical needs.

We must also satisfy the canary bird seed trade, and the Sherwin Williams Paint Company, which uses hemp seed oil for drying purposes. We are now working with the Department of Commerce in finding substitutes for the legitimate trade, and after that is accomplished, the path will be cleared for the treaties and for federal law.

The commissioner was permitted to try his idea in June 1936, when he and Fuller represented the United States at the Conference for the Suppression of the Illicit Traffic in Dangerous Drugs, held in Geneva. The United States sought to incorporate a requirement for cannabis control in a treaty with twenty-six other nations. Perhaps to have additional leverage, or perhaps to dramatize the opposition of other governments, just before the conference opened the U.S. delegation asked for permission to abstain from participationif American proposals were turned down. Still recalling the regrettable isolation that followed American departure from a similar conference in 1925, the State Department refused permission. So, although cannabis was excluded, the delegation stayed but did not sign the Convention. The United States was the only nation represented which did not do so.31

In the summer of 1936 it therefore became obvious that there would be no law to placate the Southwest unless some federal legislation under traditional legal powers was enacted. The Treasury's General Counsel then suggested the marihuana transfer tax, about which the commissioner had strong doubts, but the bureau loyally went along with the plan and did its best to present a strong case to Congress. To Anslinger, Congress did not seem very concerned and "the only information they had was what we would give them in our hearings."

The Treasury Department collected and considered scientific and medial opinion prior to the Tax Act hearings, but the desire to present a solid front when the department appeared before the committees of Congress caused the officials to ignore anything that qualified or minimized the evils of marihuana. The political pressure to put "something on the books," and the doubt that it could be done, combined to make the marihuana hearings a classic example of bureaucratic overkill.

In the tradition of federal departments, everyone from the Treasury Department who appeared for the Tax Act gave it full support, while those who might have had more moderate views remained in the background. In particular, the Public Health Service was not represented, although the opinion of its Division of Mental Hygiene (now the National Institute of Mental Health) was available to the Treasury Department months before the hearings in April. Like other authorities, Dr. Walter L. Treadway, head of the Mental Hygiene Division, answered a series of questions about marihuana, probably in late 1936. To the question: "What are the proofs that the use of marihuana in any of its forms is habit-forming or addictive, and what are the indications and positive proofs that such addiction develops socially undesirable characteristics in the user?" Dr. Treadway replied in full:

Cannabis indica does not produce dependence as in opium addiction. In opium addiction there is a complete dependence and when it is withdrawn there is actual physical pain which is not the case with cannabis. Alcohol more nearly produces the same effect as cannabis in that there is an excitement or a general feeling of lifting of personality, followed by a delirious stage, and subsequent narcosis. There is no dependence or increased tolerance such as in opium addiction. As to the social or moral degradation associated with cannabis it probably belongs in the same category as alcohol. As with alcohol, it may be taken a relatively long time without social or emotional breakdown. Marijuana is habit-forming although not addicting in the same sense as alcohol might be with some people, or sugar, or coffee. Marijuana. produces a delirium with a frenzy which might result in violence: but this is also true of alcohol.32

The department held a conference in the Treasury Building on 14 January 1937.33 Attending were fourteen government officials and consultants, many of whom would testify a few months later before the congressional committees deliberating the Tax Act. The purpose of the conference was to prepare a satisfactory legal definition of marihuana for the proposed legislation and to make some final arrangements for the presentation to Congress. Dr. Treadway was not present, although Dr. Carl Voegtlin, chief of the Division of Pharmacology of the National Institute of Health, was there to assist, along with some chemists, pharmacologists, and Commissioner Anslinger. Two members of the Treasury's legal office and the FBN's general counsel were also present.

Fortunately, the conference was stenographically transcribed. Most of the conference was devoted to ascertaining which part of the marihuana plant was pharmacologically active and what should be the name of the soon-to-be-taxed substance. Conversation was chiefly between the scientists and the Treasury lawyers and reveals that the department did take into consideration scientific and medical opinion in the preparation of the legislation.

The participants knew that they would have to be prepared to rebut any suggested valid use or inclusion of marihuana through an exemption—the goal was full prohibition. Trade or rnedical exceptions would make enforcement considerably more expensive, and cost was a consideration. This factor and the lack of increased appropriations for several years after its enactment are consistent with Anslinger's claim that the Tax Act was no boon to his bureaucratic structure.

Alfred L. Tennyson, the bureau's counsel, emphasized to the group that every detail of the legislation would have to be worked out well ahead of the hearings. Perhaps a little defensively, the commissioner wanted the group to know that the conference was not "a fishing expedition"; 296 seizures of cannabis had been made in 1936 alone. He complained that illicit traffic showed up in almost every state.

With regard to the effects of marihuana on the personality, S. G. Tipton of the Treasury's legal staff asked the commissioner: "Have you lots of cases on this? Horror stories—that's what we want." Anslinger did indeed have a collection. Then in one of the most significant moments in the meeting, the commissioner asked Dr. Voegtlin whether marihuana actually produces insanity. The NIH pharmacology expert replied: "I think it is an established fact that prolonged use leads to insanity in certain cases, depending on the amount taken, of course. Many people take it and do not go insane, but many do." To which the Treasury's consulting chemist, H. J. Wollner, responded with a characteristic poke at foreign intransigence: "At the League of Nations they whitewashed the whole thing "

The hearings before the House were held in late April and early May.34 The Treasury's presentation to Congress has been adequately described ( although no retelling can equal a reading of the original transcript). As anticipated, the House Committee members accepted all the Treasury Department's testimony. The only witness to appear in opposition to the Administration's proposal, AMA spokesman William C. Woodward, was bombarded with hostile questions. Nevertheless, he was able to get his message across: there was no need to burden the health professions with the bill's restrictions, the states could handle the problem without any additional assistance from the federal bureaucracy, and the evidence against marihuana was incomplete. He pointedly asked where the Public Health Service and Children's Bureau experts were, if it was indeed true that the weed had horrible physiological effects and was wreaking havoc among America's schoolchildren. Dr. Woodward's arguments were ignored. One reason for this poor reception was that the AMA had aroused considerable hostility with its successful opposition of President Roosevelt's plan to include health insurance in the Social Security Act. Reminiscent of their position in the fight over the Harrison Act, the most "liberal" spokesmen were among the most eager to protect the public by prohibiting cannabis.

After the House and Senate hearings, the bill was passed by Congress with no difficulty and came into effect on October 1937. One of the regrettable aspects of the Marihuana Tax Act was that anything less than total prohibition of marihuana would greatly diminish its value as a sop to aroused citizens and would make it enormously more difficult to control without additional appropriations. Enforcement continued to be primarily the responsibility of local police aided occasionally by FBN agents. Marihuana violators were not difficult to apprehend, and the Bureau was able to reassure the public by an impressive number of arrests.

After passage of the Act, the educational campaign of the bureau stepped up, but other publicity campaigns by lay organizations, which claimed that the menace was still out of hand, were muted by bureau opposition. For example, the creators of the often reprinted marihuana poster warning children of the "killer drug marihuana" were in fact put out of business by the bureau because their tactics were beginning to alarm the citizens of Chicago. The bureau attacked such apostles of fear and had only contempt for their profit motives." One reason for the bureau's action may have been because of its policy of designing educational literature that would dissuade young people from trying the substance."36 Another reason may have been that it reflected the commissioner's belief that the problem was under control in most of the nation's communities, and any assertion that it was out of control would only embarrass the Treasury Department.

On the other hand, the bureau resented later medical rebuttal of claims that marihuana was not an extreme danger, for example in the La Guardia Report of 1944.37 These responses from the bureau—one a strong and publicly effective attack on the medical criticism of the bureau's action and the other the closing down of the Inter-State Narcotic Association for spreading disturbing scare stories—were designed to show that the bureau fought a great menace, and that the menace was under control.

Why the marihuana law was so eagerly desired by some and, when enacted, so effectively placating are fundamental questions. From the evidence examined, the FBN does not appear to have created the marihuana scare of the early 1930s. Such scapegoating offers no more than it did in the era when marihuana was blamed for almost any vicious crime. When viewed from the narrow goal of placating fears about an "alien minority," the Act was serviceable for more than a quarter of a century. For the broader significance of the marihuana law and an understanding of the dynamics involved in prohibitive legislation, the Tax Act must be placed in its cultural and institutional context.

NOTES

1 The following account of Commissioner Anslinger's career and the occasional quotations are based on my interview with him in Hollidaysburg, Pa., on 30 May, 1970; examination of his papers deposited in the Archives of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa.; interviews with his associates and foes; as well as brief published accounts (Current Biography, 1948, pp. 20-22; Stanley Meisler, "Federal Narcotics Czar," The Nation, 20 Feb. 1960, pp. 159-62). Anslinger was the co-author of two melodramatic books on the narcotics traffic, The Murderers: The Story of the Narcotic Gangs ( with Will Ousler, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), and The Protectors ( with J. D. Gregory, New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1964). A somewhat more detailed study is his Traffic in Narcotics ( with W. F. Tompkins, New York: Funk and Wag-nails, 1953).

2 Anslinger to Prize Committee on the 18th Amendment, New York City, 19 Nov. 1928 (AP, box 12).

3 Rep. John M. Coffee, "An Investigation of the Narcotic Evil," Cong. Rec., House, 83, pt. 11 : 2299-3370, 75th Cong., 3rd Sess., 14 June 1938. Coffee demanded an investigation by the PHS of the extent of narcotics use in the U.S. and the FBN's mode of enforcement. No such investigation was authorized.

4 Public Law 255, 82nd Cong., 1st Sess., approved 2 Nov. 1951; Public Law 728, 84th Cong., 2nd Sess. approved 18 July 1956.

5 Cong. Rec., House, 61, pt. 3 : 3113-14, 27 June 1921, 67th Cong., 1st Sess. Volk predicted increased drunkenness, insanity, criminality, and narcotic use as a result of Prohibition.

6 "The Referendum on the Use of Alcohol in the Practice of Medicine: Final Report," JAMA 78 : 210-31 (1922); 37T of American physicians were polled ( 53,900 ); of these 58% replied and of the responders 83% were general physicians. To the basic questions, 51% said whiskey was necessary in the practice of medicine, 32% favored also the use of wine, and only 26% said beer was a necessity. To the question, "Should physicians be restricted in their prescription of alcohol?" 58% replied yes. A large number of physicians favored regulations like those under the Harrison law (217-18).

7 Arnold H. Taylor, American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic, 1900— 1939 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 3-40.

8 Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), ch. 3915, sect. 8, 59th Cong., 1st Sess.

9 Importation and Use of Opium, Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, House, 6ist Cong., 3rd Sess., 11 jan. 1911, pp. 5o, 75-78.

10 Ibid. 80.

11 Importation and Use of Opium, Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, House, 6ist Cong., 3rd Sess., 14 Dec. 1919, p. 7.

12 Letter from H. J. Finger to Dr. Hamilton Wright, 2 July 1911 (WP, entry 39).

13 "International Opium Convention," Amer. J. Internat. Law 6 : 177-92 (1912).

14 "The Second Geneva Convention," reprinted in C. E. Terry and M. Pellens, The Opium Problem (New York: Bureau of Social Hygiene, 1928, reprint ed. Montclair, N.J. Patterson Smith, 1970), pp. 945-61.

15 Dr. Oscar Dowling to Gov. John M. Parker, 21 Aug. 192o; and to Surgeon General Hugh S. Cumming, 25 Aug. 192c (PHSR ).

16 Public Law No. 672, 70th Cong., 2nd Sess., approved 19 Jan. 1929.

17 J. Samora, Los Moiados: The Wetback Story ( Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1969), pp. 38-46.

18 W. E. Safford, Economic Botanist, Bureau of Plant Industry, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture wrote: "There is a very pernicious habit-forming drug used by the lower class of Mexican in certain localities, the use of which the Mexican government is endeavoring to stamp out. This is Cannabis indice, the hashish of the Orient, in Mexico called marihuana. It has found its way into prisons and penitentiaries, sometimes mixed with tobacco, and has been the cause of several uprisings." ("Narcotics and Intoxicants Used by American Indians," typed memorandum prepared for the U.S. Indian Service, undated but accompanying letter to PHS dated io May 1921 [PHS111).

19 A. E. Fossier, "The Marihuana Menace," New Orleans Med. Surg. J. 84 : 247-51 (1931).

20 P. S. Taylor, "More Bars against the Mexicans?" Survey, April 1930, p. 26.

21 N.Y . Times, 15 Sept. 1935.

22 W. Bromberg, "Marihuana Intoxication," Amer. J. Psychiat. 91 : 303-30 (1934).

23 E. Stanley, "Marihuana as a Developer of Criminals," Amer. J. Police Sci. 2 : 252 (1931).

24 "Report by the Government of the United States of America for the Calendar Year Ended December 31, 1931: On the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs," Federal Bureau of Narcotics (GPO, 1932), P. 51.

25 "Uniform State Narcotic Act," reprinted in W. B. Eldridge, Narcotics and the Law, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 161-75.

26 N.Y. Times, 3 Jan. 1937.

27 Sonzinsky v. U.S., 57 S. Ct. 554, decided 29 March 1937.

28 "Don't Be a `Mugglehead'," Worcester (Mass. ) Telegraph, ii Oct. 1936.

29 Floyd K. Baskette to FBN, 4 Sept. 1936 ( AP, box 6).

30 Confidential memorandum from Harry J. Anslinger to Asst. Secretary of the Treasury Stephen B. Gibbons, i Feb. 1936 ( AP, box 12).

31 Taylor, Narcotics Traffic, p. 292.

32 Marihuana questionnaire filled out by Dr. Walter L. Treadway ( AP, box 6).

33 Transcript of the conference on Cannabis sativa, held 14 Jan. 1937, in the Treasury Building (AP, box 6).

34 Taxation of Marihuana, Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, House, 27-30 April and 4 May 1937, 75th Cong., ist Sess.

35 "Inter-state Narcotic Association," Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, FBN file 0145-18.

36 "Report . . . for 1938: On the Traffic in Opium," p. 49.

37 Mayor's Committee on Marihuana, The Marihuana Problem in the City of New York ( Lancaster, Pa.: Cattell Press, 1944).