The Commissioner's Morphine

“Harry Anslinger spent thirty-two years destroying the lives of people dependent on opiates. He spent his final years dependent on morphine for angina. He never publicly acknowledged the irony.”

Harry Anslinger retired from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1962 after thirty-two years. He spent two more years as US Representative to the United Nations Narcotics Commission, continuing to shape international drug policy toward prohibition and criminalization. He died on November 14, 1975.

In the final years of his life, Anslinger developed angina, a heart condition managed with opiates. He used morphine for pain relief. He was, pharmacologically, dependent on the same class of drugs whose users he had spent his career criminalizing, shaming, imprisoning, and in some cases destroying.

An acute version of this irony might suggest that Anslinger was a hypocrite who understood, privately, that opiate dependency was a medical condition and chose to treat it as a crime in others while treating it as an illness in himself. The historical record does not support this clean interpretation. His morphine use was legal and prescribed, and he almost certainly categorized it, as the culture of his time categorized it, as categorically different from 'drug addiction.'

But this categorical distinction is precisely what Chasing the Scream challenges. The pharmacology of dependence does not recognize the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate use. The body that becomes dependent on prescribed morphine and the body that becomes dependent on street heroin are going through the same process. What differs is the social framing, the price, the purity, and the legal status, not the underlying biology.

Anslinger's morphine use is, in Hari's account, the compressed argument of the entire book: the disease does not respect the ideology of the person who has it. The policy that treated addiction as a moral failure deserving punishment was maintained by a man who, in his final years, was medically dependent on the class of drugs he had spent a career condemning. He never made this connection public. It seems he never made it privately either.

Sources

• Hari, Chasing the Scream (2015)
• Wikipedia, Harry J. Anslinger