You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (59 page)

Anslinger needed to find new villains. As the twentieth century approached its midpoint
overt
racism became more and more distasteful.
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In addition, with World War II the politicians had no need for exaggerated fears to energize voters, as the Axis powers provided a real one. Anslinger still tried. He warned that legions of addicted GIs returning to America would need the FBN’s attention. This failed to materialize, and Anslinger was disgruntled by the FBN’s lack of funding.
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Luckily for him, a new enemy was rising. Like his fellow bureaucratic dictator, J. Edgar Hoover, Anslinger used the threat of communism to get congressional funds flowing. The Communists were trying to destroy the West not with soldiers, but with opium.
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In 1948, Anslinger made a remarkable 180-degree turn. He testified to congress that marijuana, the drug he used to call the “killer drug,” made one so tranquil and peaceful that Communists were supplying huge amounts to the American military, government employees, and key citizens to weaken their fighting spirit.
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The FBN’s budget was doubled.

Anslinger also found another drug culprit—liberal judges. Once again, he had no evidence, but he only needed a couple unscrupulous congressmen looking for a
crusade to help their approval ratings. The congressmen would hold the hearings to get the press’ attention and Anslinger would trot out his newspaper clippings and lies. In this manner, Anslinger had the federal government institute harsh minimum mandatory sentences and institute the death penalty for narcotics violations.

Anslinger bullied anyone who challenged him. New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia authorized an expert panel to study the marijuana problem. Anslinger’s reacted by attacking the mayor and the panel personally and launched a flurry of accusations three years before the investigation was completed. By the time the panel announced marijuana was relatively harmless, the press had tired of the fuss, leading to almost no coverage.
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Anslinger then banned all marijuana research in the United States so his newspaper clippings could never be challenged again.

When Anslinger had Congress institute mandatory minimum sentencing in 1951, he aroused the attention of lawyers at the American Bar Association (ABA), who thought that mandatory sentencing unconstitutionally violated the independence of the judiciary. One of its chairmen, Rufus King, began researching the legal history of the Harrison Narcotics Act and was flabbergasted.

In 1924, a respected doctor in the state of Washington had been set up by an addict on the payroll of the Treasury Department. She told the doctor she was an addict, in terrible pain, and needed medication. He wrote her a prescription for three tablets of cocaine and a tablet of morphine. The next day Treasury agents arrested him and put him in jail. He was convicted but appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court threw out his conviction as unconstitutional, thus invalidating the Treasury Department’s entire scheme of enforcement.

None of this was remarkable. What was remarkable was that Anslinger and the Treasury Department ignored the ruling. The thousands of doctor arrests made over the next decade were illegal, including the ones that had bullied the AMA into submission. When King asked his European counterparts about their countries’ drug problems, they responded, “What drug problem?” The whole thing was a hoax.

King set up a joint committee between the ABA and the AMA to straighten out the situation and naively asked Anslinger to participate. Anslinger refused, but asked to be kept informed of its progress. When the committee first published their findings for a limited distribution, Anslinger immediately published an identical-looking report that personally attacked the committee members.

The FBN sent this report to media outlets all over the country at the taxpayers’ expense. Anslinger portrayed the ABA and AMA as Communist tools. Treasury Department agents went to the private foundation that was funding the report and told them they were supporting a “controversial” study. The Treasury Department had control over the foundation’s tax-exempt status so it withdrew its support.

Although Anslinger destroyed the report, he did not destroy King. King challenged Anslinger publicly for the next three years and Anslinger unwisely took him on in print and radio. Perhaps Anslinger had been getting by on lies, bluster, and newspaper clippings for so long he forgot what passed as legitimate evidence. One of Anslinger’s rants in these debates was brought to the attention of President John F. Kennedy, and he decided Anslinger should go. Anslinger resigned several months later. The year was 1962.

Anslinger would later admit to supplying morphine to his friend and fellow fearmonger Senator Joseph McCarthy. He did this for years and his justification was that McCarthy was a fine American.
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At the end of his life Anslinger became a morphine addict himself.
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Neither he nor McCarthy were ever arrested, nor did they ever have to serve mandatory prison sentences.

Despite Anslinger’s resignation, the drug battle did not abate. Drug laws and decades of disinformation were in place. Most importantly, so was Anslinger’s agency, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. As President Ronald Reagan would later note, government agencies self-perpetuate.
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A boon also arose. The anti-drug rhetoric could no longer blame racial minorities for drug problems as open racism was no longer acceptable. The 1960s would provide a stigmatized minority to take their place—the hippie.

Every generation rebels against its parents and in the 1960s the youngest generation was massive, with 76 million “baby-boomers” reaching adolescence.
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By 1965, half of the American population was under 30. At the same time, the Vietnam
War created disillusionment among the young adults being sent to fight. This led the boomers to question their parents’ values in other areas, such as race, sex, and drugs. Instead of sticking to their parents’ drug—alcohol—the adventurous youth, called “hippies,” turned to hallucinogens like marijuana and LSD.

Controversial anti-establishment celebrities such as Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, novelist Ken Kesey, and countless musicians such as the Beatles and the Grateful Dead openly advertised LSD as a tool to create a better world. Leary’s exhortations for youth to “tune in, turn on, drop out”
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branded hallucinogens as hostile to the American work ethic. LSD and marijuana became inextricably tied to radical politics and hippies. Forty years later, the hallucinogen/hippie link is still strong.
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Hallucinogens allowed elders to explain their children’s bizarre and disrespectful behavior. This was assisted by the media, who served the scapegoat on a plate filled with sensational lies.
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President Lyndon Johnson blamed hallucinogens for the 1960s social turmoil, and although he outlawed LSD, he did not ramp up the tough-guy rhetoric like his successor, Richard Nixon.
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Nixon was elected on a law-and-order campaign, and would put the naughty baby-boomers in their proper place—jail.

Unfortunately, the Constitution prevented the federal government from usurping state control of law enforcement. This hurdle flummoxed the Nixon White House until a staff member hit on the idea of drugs.
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The constitutional barriers to federal drug enforcement had already been trampled by Anslinger. Drugs also allowed Nixon to indirectly target the black population that he saw as the “whole problem.”
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Nixon soon began trumpeting a new national emergency.

When Nixon asserted that drugs were “decimating a generation of Americans,” drugs were such a tiny health problem that they were statistically insignificant. Many more Americans were dying from choking to death on food or from falling down stairs.
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Even Nixon’s figures put the number of heroin addicts at merely three in a thousand (the same as in Wright’s day), but he dishonestly presented that number as eight times higher than two years earlier, creating a junkie explosion.
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As a White House assistant later explained, “If we hyped the drug problem into a national crisis, we knew that Congress would give us anything we asked for.”
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Nixon used this “crisis” to create the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
that replaced the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Never armed with more than a few hundred agents before, the federal drug police force now had over 4,000 agents. The DEA had “awesome powers,”
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and its domestic and global jurisdiction was broader than that of the Central Intelligence Agency or the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

While president, Nixon would get drunk and pop Dilantin and sleeping pills from his private stash. He did not get his Dilantin from a doctor but from his financier friend Jack Dreyfuss. Nixon never had himself arrested.
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Nixon’s corruption pushed the country to elect a less iron-fisted leader, Jimmy Carter. Carter put a doctor, Peter Bourne, in charge of his drug policy. As someone who had exposure to drugs outside of the world of law enforcement, Bourne pushed Carter to eliminate criminal penalties for marijuana possession. This fell apart when Bourne wrote a sedative prescription for a young woman on his staff. Because she was a White House employee he made it out to a false name to protect her identity. She gave it to a friend who had it filled at a pharmacy being audited. When the friend could not produce an ID the police were called.

After decades of propaganda infiltrating American schools and media, anyone who even suggested legalization risked being tarred as a radical drug-pushing dopesmoking nut.
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Bourne was already in the crosshairs, and this allowed him to be blown away. The press went bananas digging through Bourne’s past. It came out that Bourne had attended a party where marijuana and cocaine were used openly. Despite not using any himself, Bourne and decriminalization were kicked out of Washington.

The next president, Ronald Reagan, picked up right where Nixon left off. In 1982, Reagan said from the Rose Garden, “We’re taking down the surrender flag
that has flown over so many drug efforts. We’re running up the battle flag.”
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The war was on.

The civil right that Reagan tore from the Constitution in the name of the drug war was protection from unconstitutional seizures. The Omnibus Crime Bill of 1984 threw due process out the window. Previously the government had to prove a person guilty before they could take her property. Now police could take money or property they believed to be tainted by drugs in a process called forfeiture. The property owner had to go through expensive legal proceedings to prove that it was not tainted if they wanted the property back.

In addition, Reagan gave law enforcement agents a huge incentive to abuse this extraordinary power. Seized assets would go to the law enforcement agencies that made the seizure. After twenty years of this legal innovation, law enforcement agencies and police departments across the country are now dependent on this “income.” Not surprisingly, the necessity of forfeiture for the war on drugs morphed into a necessity for the war on crime. There are now two hundred federal forfeiture statutes that allow forfeiture for such heinous crimes as collecting the feathers of migratory birds.
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The effect of forfeiture laws has been a massive shakedown of Americans who cannot afford legal representation.

Powder cocaine became popular with high rollers and celebrities in the 1970s. Its exorbitant expense made it a status symbol, the champagne of drugs. Stories of drug-addled rock stars publicized cocaine and other drugs. The following are a taste of this genre:

Beach Boy
Brian Wilson
was so gripped by cocaine paranoia in the late 1960s that he refused to shower for fear of what would come out of the showerhead.

Avid heroin user
Nick Cave
would write lyrics in his notebooks with a bloody needle.

Sex Pistol
Sid Vicious
was shooting up in a bathroom stall with one of the
Ramones when he dipped the syringe into the toilet bowl and injected a mixture of water, urine, puke and feces.

In 1984, one of Aerosmith’s Toxic Twins,
Steven Tyler,
suggested to the band that they cover a great song, “You See Me Crying,” not realizing they had written and recorded the song nine years earlier. The other Toxic Twin, Joe Perry, once introduced his wife to the band even though they had all known her for years.

When
Janis Joplin
’s guitarist turned blue after shooting up heroin backstage in 1969, he was revived by Zappa groupie Suzy Creamchease, not by the usual slapping and yelling, but by oral sex.

During one LSD fiesta, British rocker
Julian Cope
ran around a dinner table for an hour and a half evading the “paw” of his drummer who was a mountain lion. Cope’s feet began to burn so he ordered milk be thrown on the carpet. This was too slippery so he added a bowl of Rice Krispies to the mix. Later that night at a picnic in his attic, another bandmate perturbed Cope, so Cope pissed in his baked beans.