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As the AMA’s Dr. Woodward had asserted, the goverment’s testimony before Congress in 1937 had in fact consisted almost entirely of Hearst’s and other sensational and racist newspaper articles read aloud by Harry J. Anslinger,* director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). (This agency has since evolved into the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA]).
* Harry J. Anslinger was director of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its inception in 1931 for the next 31 years, and was only forced into retirement in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy after Anslinger tried to censor the publications and publishers of Professor Alfred Lindsmith (The Addict and the Law, Washington Post, 1961) and to blackmail and harass his employer, Indiana University.Anslinger had come under attack for racist remarks as early as 1934 by a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, Joseph Guffey, for such things as referring to “ginger-colored niggers” in letters circulated to his department heads on FBN stationery.
Prior to 1931, Anslinger was Assistant U.S. Commissioner for Prohibition. Anslinger, remember, was hand-picked to head the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics by his uncle-in-law, Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury under President Herbert Hoover. The same Andrew Mellon was also the owner and largest stockholder of the sixth largest bank (in 1937) in the United States, the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, one of only two bankers for DuPont* from 1928 to the present.
* DuPont has borrowed money from banks only twice in its entire 190-year history, once to buy control of General Motors in the 1920s. Its banking business is the prestigious plum of the financial world.
In 1937, Anslinger testified before Congress saying, “Marijuana is the most violence causing drug in the history of mankind.”
This, along with Anslinger’s outrageous racist statements and beliefs, was made to the Southern-dominated congressional committee and is now an embarrassment to read in its entirety.
For instance, Anslinger kept a “Gore File,” culled almost entirely from Hearst’s and other sensational tabloids—e.g., stories of axe murders, where one of the participants reportedly smoked a joint four days before committing the crime.
Anslinger pushed on Congress as a factual statement that about 50% of all violent crimes committed in the U.S. were committed by Spaniards, Mexican-Americans, Latin Americans, Filipinos, “Negroes”, and Greeks, and these crimes could be traced directly to marijuana.
(From Anslinger’s own records given to Pennsylvania State University, ref.: Li Cata Murders, etc.)
Not one of Anslinger’s marijuana “Gore Files” of the 1930s is believed to be true by scholars who have painstakingly checked the facts.4
4. Sloman, Larry; Reefer Madness, 1979; Bonnie and Whitebread, The Marijuana Conviction, Univ. of Virginia Press, 1974.
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