 On October 2nd, 1937, Samuel Caldwell was arrested for selling two marijuana cigarettes to Moses Baca. Caldwell was unemployed due to the Great Depression, and selling marijuana was a way for him to make a few dollars. Caldwell was the first person arrested in the United States for selling marijuana. In fact, his arrest took place the day after marijuana was criminalized. Caldwell probably had no idea that what he was doing was even illegal. But none of this mattered to the judge who sentenced him to four years hard labor in a Kansas penitentiary, saying, marijuana destroys life, I have no sympathy with those who sell this weed. I'm Chris Cowton and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In today's episode we're going to be looking at the early decades of the war on drug prior to the Nixon administration. By now, if you've been listening to the other episodes, you should have a pretty solid account of how drug prohibition came about, so this episode is going to look at how it evolved into what we recognize today as the modern drug war. Historians have debated where to date the beginning of what we actually call the war on drugs, which was traditionally dated to around 1969 when Nixon took office as he actually coined the term war on drugs. And it was with his administration that we see a major upsurge in laws and enforcement of laws against drug users, as he made it a pivotal part of his presidency. However, many historians have started to date the war on drugs to before this. 1914 and 1937 obviously serve as decent markers with the Harrison Narcotics Act and the Marijuana Tax Act, as well as another handful of laws that were passed prior to Nixon's tenure. And as we'll see, World War II also had an interesting role to play in drug policy and some historians, such as Susanna Reese, date the start of the global war on drugs to then. Where we start though really doesn't matter, but we'll be looking at the years after the Harrison Act and before the Nixon presidency. There are only a few things really worth highlighting prior to World War II that haven't already been covered, just to give a clear picture of the timeline. We know that cocaine and heroin were restricted to medical use only in 1914. And as I mentioned in the last episode, the Jones-Miller Act prohibited the importation of cocaine, so only coca leaves could be brought into the country by licensed companies. And for heroin, a similar law was passed in 1924 that essentially outlawed the domestic production of heroin. In 1927, the Bureau of Prohibition was formed, which Anslinger was part of until the creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics three years later. And the Bureau of Prohibition was tasked with cracking down on heroin, but it really was more concerned with alcohol prohibition since black market alcohol was really a much more widespread issue. And after the creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger pushed for cannabis prohibition, probably if you remember, in order to justify a larger budget, and cannabis was outlawed in 1937. In 1925, we also had the International Convention relating to dangerous drugs. The International Opium Convention is how this is often referred. And it took place in Geneva for the purpose of getting the countries to curtail narcotics production. And this was followed by another convention in 1931 called the Convention for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulation and Regulating, excuse me, the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs, which also took place in Geneva. The 1931 Convention in particular required participating countries to limit their stocks of certain narcotics to specified quantities with the intention of curtailing the use of narcotic painkillers. And this will play into the story about drugs in World War Two when most of the really interesting changes in the drug war started to take place. So I'll start with the cocaine and opiate side of the story. When Franklin Roosevelt signed his executive order in 1933 requiring US citizens to turn in any privately owned gold, which he did so that he could devalue the dollar, of course. Government owned gold had been traditionally stored in the Treasury vaults. But in 1934, all of the gold in the Treasury vaults was moved to Fort Knox. So now we had empty Treasury vaults. Remember that Harry Anzlinger's Federal Bureau of Narcotics fell under the authority of the Treasury Department because it was based on tax acts rather than explicit prohibitions. Anzlinger had an idea for what to store in the Treasury vaults now that gold was no longer taking up space. And it was something that he claimed had even more value than gold. His words, he was, of course, referring to stockpiles of cocaine and opium based drugs. This was actually reported by the Associated Press in 1940 under the headline that read, opium put in vaults of Treasury. And in this article, Harry Anzlinger claimed that the government does not own an ounce of the stockpile drugs. Meaning that the government was holding the drugs that were still legally owned by the manufacturers. Now it's pretty generally accepted that at least some of the stockpiles in the vaults were government owned, particularly from stocks seized from illegal dealers. But it is true that much of the stock was still owned by private companies. Anzlinger goes on to say that manufacturers and medical supply houses furnished the money to purchase it through the government and hold the rights to use it under the federal sanction for medical uses as needed. In fact, some of the illegal supply of drugs in the late 1940s and early 1950s were coming straight from the Treasury vaults. In 1952, the US Attorney's Office sought cooperation from the FBN during an investigation into an illegal cocaine ring in Washington, D.C. This was published in the Saturday Evening Post and the FBN did not want to cooperate because the cocaine ring had been traced back to the drugs in the Treasury vaults where apparently a janitor named Eddie Gregg had smuggled up to 100 ounces of cocaine and as much as 50 pounds of marijuana out of the vaults and into the drug underworld. But the reputation of the FBN in Congress wasn't tarnished by any of this. In fact, Anzlinger commonly touted the important role that his organization played in national defense as well as its expert control over the drug supply in the United States. Anzlinger wanted to keep these stockpiles so that the United States could supply its allies with all the painkillers they needed during World War II. And of course, the stockpiles had to continue after the war and did just to be safe. So these stockpiles, which were entirely controlled by Anzlinger, were a way of growing his own personal power. And in fact, these stockpiles were a violation of the quota set in the 1931 agreement that I mentioned earlier. But Anzlinger did not count any of the Treasury vault stockpiles of drugs toward these quotas. This was all taking place while Anzlinger was asserting his own authority globally in the attempt to control coca leaves, which, if you remember from the previous episode, was largely a cronious strategy to benefit Coca-Cola and his favored chemical and pharmaceutical companies, meaning Merck and Maywood. In addition to heading the FBN, Anzlinger served for a time as a delegate to the UN, where he spread his demagogic narrative of coca leaves. So in 1950, the UN commissioned a study on coca leaves on fatigue, which was conducted actually by the US Office of Naval Research. And when they were getting coca leaves shipped to them, Anzlinger actually interfered to stop the shipment. So this is the explanation that he gave for his meddling. I'm going to read a quote from him. The fact that a domestic scientific project was in progress in the United States involving the study of the effect of chewing of coca leaves on fatigue would have a most unfortunate effect on our efforts to achieve international agreement on limitation of production of the leaves to medical and scientific needs. Accomplishments in this direction have been based on the tentative assumption that the use of coca leaves for chewing is neither medical nor scientific. Without knowledge of the official findings of the commission of inquiry, I nevertheless feel strongly that the practice of chewing coca leaves should never be recognized as legal. The last sentence really tells it all. Without knowledge of the official findings, he says that coca leaf chewing should be illegal. In other words, he was basically saying that these scientific studies might undermine the lies that he'd been peddling for two decades now. And this wasn't the only time that Anzlinger stepped into halt scientific research on the possible uses of coca leaves. When Dr. Robert Schwab was conducting studies on the coca leaves and was finding legitimate uses for them, Anzlinger argued that, and I'm quoting here again, I am fearful of an attempt being made to expand a scientific use such as you have in mind into a so called legitimate use, which is neither medical nor scientific, in which you cannot fail to prejudice the proposed international agreement to limit the production of these leaves to medical and scientific purposes only. Of course, Schwab's research was both medical and scientific, but Anzlinger was far more concerned with the political implications that any study showing the positive benefits of the coca leaf might have on his propaganda. Moving on to marijuana, Anzlinger was also still of course on his anti cannabis rampage in the 1940s. In 1941, four years after cannabis had been criminalized, the plant was finally removed from the United States Pharmacopia and National Formulary, where it had previously been listed as a treatment for more than 100 medical issues. And during this time, Anzlinger was specifically targeting jazz musicians for their notorious marijuana use. And in fact, the FBN actually kept a file that was simply called Marijuana and Musicians, which contained all of the data gathered by FBN agents regarding well-known jazz artists, including Louis Armstrong, Billy Holiday. If any of you have read Chasing the Scream, which is my absolute favorite book on the war on drugs, it's absolutely wonderful. He's got, I think they're turning this into a movie called The Hunting of Billy Holiday, based on a chapter of his book about that. It's absolutely a riveting tale. Billy Holiday was heavily harassed by the FBN. The file also contained data on Thelonious Monk and dozens of other musicians. And in fact, in 1951, Thelonious Monk would be arrested and falsely imprisoned on drug charges. And even after his innocence was proven, he was denied a cabaret card for another six years. So a lot of this was just persecution against a culture that Anzlinger hated jazz so much that he was critical, like he hated cartoons that had jazz music even just used in them, like Betty Boop cartoons used jazz. And Popeye hated Popeye. And Popeye's kind of interesting because the spinach actually, I don't know if this was done when they initially invented the cartoon, or if it's something that some jazz musicians started attributing later on, but the spinach would represent marijuana, which he would sometimes just inhale through a pipe and then swallow the spinach and then get the superhuman strength, which of course also ridiculous. But there were jazz songs referencing marijuana because of Popeye. So Anzlinger, he hated jazz. He hated anything associated with jazz. So whether he hated jazz because it was associated with marijuana or he hated marijuana because it was associated to jazz or a little bit of both is hard to tell, but he really heavily persecuted these people. And in 1942, Anzlinger had to cede some of his authority to the US military in the Department of Agriculture because the government needed large quantities of hemp to supply the military with uniforms, hemp rope for naval ships, hemp was used to make parachutes, and other hemp-based products as well, including they used hemp oils for aviation lubricants. So just all kinds of just countless industrial products used for hemp that the military needed to help with the war effort. So only five years after the Marijuana Tax Act had completely obliterated the domestic industry for industrial hemp. The government was scrambling to get farmers to grow it again. The Department of Agriculture actually produced a propaganda film entitled Hemp for Victory, which urged farmers to grow hemp to patriotically support the war effort. Naturally, this was accompanied by significant subsidies for hemp production. So just to recap the assertive of the government's hemp policy. In 1937, cannabis is made illegal, but Anzlinger, if you remember from the Marijuana episode, Anzlinger promised that industrial hemp would not be included, but since Congress didn't read the bill, they didn't see that Anzlinger's promise was not part of the law, and Anzlinger enforced the law against industrial hemp, breaking his promise, and wiping out the hemp industry. Five years later, the government is starving for hemp to supply the military with all kinds of items, so it produces a propaganda film and offers generous subsidies to get farmers to start growing 300,000 acres of hemp. And if that isn't enough, by the way, several years later, after World War II, the National Guard would actually be commissioned, defined, and destroy marijuana plants in the United States, and the vast majority of the plants they destroyed were simply the low THC ditchweed that was nothing more than the outgrowth of the industrial hemp produced in World War II. So let that all sink in. In the same year that all this was going on, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA, it started trying to develop a truth drug for advanced interrogation, and many of the experiments involved cannabis indica. One of the FBN officials named George Hunter White, who I will be talking about in the next episode on LSD, and you will not believe some of the things that this guy did with government sanction, George White was giving truth drug cigarettes, which meant that they contained an odorless and tasteless cannabis extract to any army personnel suspected of being a communist. And this included members of the Manhattan Project when he visited them in September of 1943. Of course, the truth drug was never successful, but that didn't stop the government from wasting millions of taxpayer dollars trying to develop it, and we'll get more into all of this in the next episode. It's gonna be really fascinating stuff, so you're gonna wanna listen to that. Another thorn in Anselinger's side was a report that came out in 1944 that had been commissioned five years earlier by New York mayor, Fiorella LaGuardia. And this study was conducted by scientists and doctors from the New York Academy of Medicine, and they investigated the dangers of marijuana. And this report disproved virtually every claim that Anselinger had ever made about marijuana. And it concluded that it wasn't even correct to call marijuana a narcotic because that term is used to refer to something lethal or poisonous. And they concluded that cannabis was neither. So the report concluded, and I'm quoting here, pro-longed use of the drug does not lead to physical, mental, or moral degeneration, nor have we observed any permanent deleterious effects from its continued use. And it said that marijuana is absolutely non-addictive and has no connection to sexual deviancy, violence, or criminality. Furthermore, the LaGuardia report listed the medical benefits of cannabis. So basically the LaGuardia report was overwhelmingly positive in regards to marijuana use, dismissing negative effects and listing beneficial aspects of the use. But Anselinger was furious when the report came out. He actually threatened to arrest the doctors involved in the study and claimed that the report was, quote, a government-printed invitation to youth and adults above all teenagers to go ahead and smoke all the reefers they feel like. All the reefers they feel like. An editorial response was published in 1945 by the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was probably written by Anselinger himself claiming that the LaGuardia report, quote, has already done great damage to the cause of law enforcement. Public officials will do well to disregard this unscientific, uncritical study and continue to regard marijuana as a menace wherever it is pervaded. Other studies conducted in Mexico came out at roughly the same time and with the same basic conclusions. And Anselinger and his lackeys appear to have been the only people to view these studies as unscientific. In 1946, when the first meeting of the U.N. Commission on Narcotics drugs convened, it was decided that no further study needed to be conducted regarding cannabis because the LaGuardia report and the other studies were so comprehensive and clear. Obviously, Anselinger disagreed. In his 1961 book entitled The Murders, the Shocking Story of the Narcotic Gangs. Anselinger, I love his menacing title there. Anselinger referenced the LaGuardia report and called it giddy sociology and medical mumbo jumbo. When a scientist named Alfred Linsmith working out of the University of Indiana started conducting research about the humane medical treatment for drug addicts, he criticized the, quote, stereotyped misinformation that was being pedaled by the FBN. Anselinger and his agents responded by tapping his telephone and at one point they even tried to plant narcotics on him to frame him and prosecute him for possession. This was not successful, thank God, but Anselinger went to J. Edgar Hoover after this to see if he could get any information on Linsmith connecting him to communists. And despite all of this, Linsmith's work continued to gain attention with the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association and Anselinger was unable to suppress any of the research produced, though he continued to try. In fact, it was about the same time as these reports that Anselinger's narrative about marijuana changed. Previously, if you remember, he claimed that marijuana caused users to become deranged and violent. But in 1948, with the onset of the Cold War, he started arguing that it made people passive and they would be unable to defend against the red menace of communism. In a testimony to Congress, Anselinger said marijuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing. He also did a 180 on the gateway drug theory. In 1937, when the Marijuana Tax Act was being debated, Anselinger was asked by Representative John Dingle, quote, I'm just wondering whether the marijuana addict graduates into a heroin, an opium, or a cocaine user. And Anselinger responded, no, sir, I have not heard of a case of that kind. I think it is an entirely different class. The marijuana addict does not go in that direction. That was 1937, his response on the gateway drug idea. Now in the late 1940s, Anselinger was singing a different tune. He said that most addicts, quote, started on smoking marijuana and graduated to heroin. They took to the needle when the thrill of marijuana was gone. This, of course, is a theory that is still circulated by the government today, despite there having since been studies showing that not only is there no evidence that the gateway theory is true, but that marijuana has actually been shown to help people break addictions to harder drugs. But with the typical government incentives, Anselinger's 180 degree change on marijuana did not matter one bit to the legislators. The 1950s also saw an increase in the drug laws and punishments, starting in 1951 with the passage of the Boggs Amendment, which increased the penalties for drug crimes and instituted the first mandatory minimum sentences. This is when we first had drug users being denied parole that was still being granted to rapists and murderers. This law, which made no distinction between drug traffickers and drug users, basically extended the red scare to the war on drugs. Ironically, this is when Anselinger was supplying opiates from the treasury vaults to none other than Senator Joseph McCarthy, who he vaguely alluded to in his book I mentioned a minute ago, when he writes of one of the most influential members of Congress who was an opiate addict, and according to John C. Williams, who wrote a biography of Anselinger, the justification for feeding McCarthy's addiction was to prevent him from succumbing to the communists while dealing with the cravings of his drug dependency. Anselinger also acknowledged that the U.S. government was also supporting drug smuggling in areas in which the drug trafficking was being done by anti-communists, which was a common theme throughout the 70s and 80s as well, where the government was fighting against drug traffickers on one hand and helping them traffic drugs on the other because they were allies against communists in some country or another. And this is all despite the fact that the passage of the box amendment was justified with Anselinger's urging on the fears of the communists using drugs against Americans. In 1956, Congress strengthened its drug laws once more with the Narcotics Control Act. This raised the maximum penalties on marijuana that were put in place with the Boggs Act five years prior and it even instituted the death penalty for heroin cells to a minor. This act also armed for the first time the agents of the FBN and it increased their budget quite significantly. It was in the 1950s that certain drug enforcement cases started reaching the Supreme Court and these were as significant, if not more significant than the laws being passed in this time. In 1955, the police busted into the apartment of a heroin dealer named William Miller and arrested him and one other person despite not having a warrant. And this went to the Supreme Court in the case Miller v. United States where the justices actually sided with Miller and argued that the police action was a violation of the Castle Doctrine which is based on the idea that a man's home is his castle and the police could not enter without permission or a warrant. But in the 1963 case, KRV California which came out of a marijuana arrest, the Supreme Court ruled that the warrantless search of George Care's apartment was lawful. So this ruling effectively expanded police powers to invade homes to search for illegal drugs. It was also in the 1960s that the first special weapons and tactics or SWAT unit was formed by a Los Angeles police officer named Daryl Gates and two colleagues named John Nelson and Jeff Rogers. They formed the first group informally by finding the best shooters in their police force and training them in marine strategies for handling snipers. And they were first set loose on anti-war protesters and Daryl Gates who was put in charge of the men organized them like a military platoon to quell the rioters. The success of the team then called the Tactical Operations Planning Unit inspired police departments all over the country to start stockpiling weaponry like armored vehicles and high powered rifles creating the military culture of police that is particularly controversial in recent years. And although SWAT was not formed as part of the war on drugs this would be the primary battlefield and justification for growth for the next several decades. This was accompanied in 1968 with the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs which combined the Bureau of Drug Abuse and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. This gave the agency more power in actually fighting the war on drugs directly by increasing its enforcement power. And in the same year, a new crime bill called the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act was passed that targeted more than just drug crimes. It aimed at crime in general but drug crimes were included in this and it also expanded police powers. This authorized wiretapping, it expanded the powers of the FBI, it limited interstate handgun cells and it weakened the Miranda rights obligations for police officers. And this all coincided with the rise in drug use and drug related violence. Likely not a coincidence as drug dealers were being faced with more armed opposition from government so they logically reacted by increasing their own arms and their own propensity for violence. But the hippie culture was also yielding an increased drug market throughout the country so drug arrests and drug related deaths were skyrocketing in the 1960s and this really opened the door for the official creation of the war on drugs by Richard Nixon, which we will be talking about in a later episode. So that's where I will end the story today and the next episode, which you are not going to want to miss, we're going to talk about mostly LSD and this will involve not only the cultural rise of LSD which is just interesting for its own sake, it just has some of the funniest anecdotes in American history and in my opinion. But also the much more disturbing CIA experiments with LSD, which I'm going to be talking quite a bit about in the next episode, you're absolutely going to want to listen to it so make sure you subscribe to the podcast and thanks for listening. For more content like this, visit mesus.org.