Lindesmith v. Anslinger: an early government victory in the failed war on drugs.

• Author: Galliher, John F.

1. INTRODUCTION

   The late Alfred Lindesmith was an Indiana University sociology professor who was a long-time advocate of medical treatment of addiction. We demonstrate below how the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) attempted to intimidate Lindesmith, stifle his research, and interfere with his publication of articles counter to FBN policies. In addition, we argue that the American banning of the 1946 Canadian film on drug addiction, Drug Addict, may have been a pivotal event in a pattern of censorship and disinformation carried on by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) under the leadership of its long-time Director, Harry Anslinger. The FBN's campaign to suppress information played a significant role in the emerging public ideology and mythology regarding drug addicts and drug addiction in the United States. Lindesmith's unsuccessful efforts against the ban, as illustrated by his personal papers, his FBN file recently released to the National Archives, Anslinger's papers in the National Archives, and those recently released under the Freedom of Information Act, demonstrate the nearly absolute control of information exercised by the FBN.

   We attempt to put in historical context the FBN campaign to develop a prohibitive national drug control policy. As Howard Becker, who began unhindered public criticism of FBN-inspired drug policies as early as 1963 with his famous monograph, Outsiders,(1) recently observed: "I never actually understood why Anslinger bothered with Lindesmith, who could have published whatever he wanted without having the slightest effect on policy. You can see that now when everyone under the sun is publishing whatever they want ... and it doesn't change a thing."(2)

   We will attempt to answer Becker's question by demonstrating how the political and cultural context from the 1930s through the early 1950s presented a vastly different situation for critics of American drug control policies compared to later periods after a national drug policy was institutionalized.

2. LINDESMITH, THE SELF AND THE ADDICT

   Lindesmith was a University of Chicago trained social psychologist who received a Ph.D. in 1937. His training provided him with a grounding in interactionist theory and concepts, a method of analysis, a specific orientation toward data collection, and a key contact to begin collection of dissertation data. Lindesmith's five years at Chicago brought him into contact with Herbert Blumer, whose research emphasized the role of the self concept in human interaction.(3) Lindesmith also took courses from Chicago sociologists Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth, whose research emphasized the critical role of fieldwork and the in-depth treatment of qualitative data.(4) During the early and mid-1930s, the reputation of The Polish Peasant In Europe and America by W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki(5) was at its zenith at the University of Chicago.(6) The book's emphasis on life history and Znaniecki's subsequent development of inductive methods(7) made an indelible mark on Lindesmith's career. Lindesmith was also close to criminologist Edwin Sutherland during Sutherland's brief stay at Chicago (1932-35).(8) As a result of this association, Lindesmith became acquainted with drug addicts and addiction through Broadway Jones, the subject for Sutherland's The Professional Thief.(9) Consequently, at Chicago, Lindesmith mastered a theoretical orientation, was prevailed upon to collect qualitative data in the field, became dedicated to inductive methods, and was accorded valuable personal contacts which set his career on a long-term path.

   Lindesmith drew on the individual's self concept in his dissertation and later in his Social Psychology textbook,(10) This concept in turn made possible Lindesmith's distinction between physical and psychological addiction. For physical addiction to develop into psychological addiction, "the person's interpretation of his own withdrawal distress is a crucial event ... made possible by the existence of language behavior and conceptual thought."(11) In other words, a defining characteristic of all human beings is that they have the capacity to see themselves as objects.(12) When the intellectual connection between discontinuing drug use and withdrawal occurs, any initial euphoria from drug use "vanishes and is replaced by the negative effect of relieving withdrawal distress."(13) Therefore, "the theory that only abnormal persons become drug addicts is untenable."(14) The proposition that addicts are in all ways normal human beings made punitive drug prohibitions seem less reasonable.(15) These ideas propelled Lindesmith's intense, lifelong, and narrowly focused intellectual and political position.

   1. ENTER HARRY ANSLINGER

      Lindesmith's views of human addiction and drug addicts were diametrically opposed by those of Harry Anslinger and the FBN.(16) Around the same time that Lindesmith began his graduate training, a new American drug control policy began to take shape through Anslinger's efforts. As a young man during World War I and the 1920s, Anslinger worked in the foreign service and served for several years in the ill-fated Prohibition division of the Department of the Treasury.(17) After scandal rocked the narcotics sector of the Prohibition division in the late 1920s, Anslinger was appointed head of the newly-created Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930.(18) The FBN was a division of the Treasury Department designated to enforce drug control statutes drafted as tax measures. Anslinger remained at this post until his apparently forced retirement in 1962.(19) For decades writers have marveled at the irrational direction of American drug policy after the creation of the FNB and the success of Anslinger in using law enforcement to control public opinion regarding drug use and addiction.(20)

      The great migration of African-Americans to urban centers in the North, coupled with the emergence of an illicit narcotics market after the enactment of the Harrison Act of 1914, changed the face of addiction in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York.(21) Beginning after World War I and through the 1940s, there were wholesale demographic changes in the United States which created public anxiety and suspicion directed at African-Americans, immigrants, and Communists.(22) During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the expanding role of the federal government created an opportunity for Harry Anslinger to successfully exploit these fears by linking drugs to minorities. Anslinger had great political power because he maintained the support of both Democrats and Republicans, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and many churches. Because the FBN controlled the licenses for the importation of opiates, Anslinger also received the support of drug companies.(23) While exploiting these fears and cultivating special interest groups, Anslinger also utilized the demographic changes in the addict population, from rural whites to urban dwellers, including a growing number of minorities.(24)

      Activities such as Anslinger's have been characterized as a moral crusade.(25) Anslinger was also a savvy bureaucrat during the Great Depression of the 1930s who excelled at protecting his organization from budget cuts by locating new legislative mandates.(26) Above all Ansligner was a government operative, with experience in the intelligence community, who through political harassment, adeptly controlled the flow of information on drug addiction. According to Sloman, "[t]he thing that Anslinger concerned himself with a lot was the dissemination of information. He completely disagreed with the free exchange of ideas on the subject."(27) Allen Ginsberg recalled that, even as late as the 1950s, it was difficult to publish books which referred to drugs or drug use:

      There was at the time [an] assumption: that if you talked about [drugs] on

      the bus or the subway, you might be arrested--even if you were only

      discussing a change in the law.... A decade later you still couldn't get

      away with a national public TV discussion of the laws without the Narcotics

      Bureau and the FCC intruding.... [T] he fear and terror ... was so real that

      it had been internalized in the ... publishing industry; and so, before the

      book could be published, all sorts of disclaimers had to be interleaved

      with the text--lest the publisher be implicated criminally with the

      author.(28)

      Foucault has described activities such as Anslinger's as "regimes of truth."(29) In such instances, truth becomes a function of power rather than factual accuracy. Accordingly, we will demonstrate that Anslinger and the FBN not only attempted to use their legal authority to censor scientific inquiry they considered antithetical to their interests, but sponsored "research" projects that had preordained results more to their liking. Controlling the drug discourse in this way allowed Anslinger and the Bureau to be taken seriously even while trading in patent untruths--and in Foucault's terms "marginalized, derided, excluded and even prohibited" any competing ideas.(30) Thus, "[t]ruth is not separated from power, rather it is one of the important vehicles and expressions of power; power is exercised through the production and dissemination of truth."(31)

      In the final analysis, Anslinger was not only a "moral entrepreneur" or a "rule creator," but a "moral enforcer" as well.(32) This allowed Anslinger to play a significant and unique role in creating an American "drug crisis." And in response to this drug crisis, Anslinger was ideally placed to provide a law enforcement response. In this fashion, he was able to guarantee himself, and the FBN, an enormous amount of political influence and legal power. Thus, Anslinger used his position in the FBN to define and legitimize his interpretation of the drug problem, to mobilize legislative initiatives, and to implement an official law enforcement plan of action, all of which Blumer argues is essential in the creation of...