The Commissioner's Last Prescription

“Anslinger spent thirty-two years destroying the lives of drug users. He spent his final years medicated with morphine. He apparently never made the connection.”

Harry Anslinger died in November 1975, medicated with morphine for his angina. He had spent thirty-two years as commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics destroying the lives of people who used opiates without medical authorization.

Hari presents this as irony. It is, but it is also something more precise: a demonstration of the categorical distinction that made Anslinger's system possible.

Anslinger's enforcement model depended on a categorical difference between 'drug addicts' (criminals, moral failures) and 'patients' (legitimate sufferers, properly managed by the medical system). The same pharmacological process, the body becoming dependent on opiates, was morally neutral in one category and criminal in the other. The distinction was not biological. It was social.

Anslinger using morphine for angina was, in his own framework, entirely different from Billie Holiday using heroin for the pain of her life. One was a patient following doctor's orders. One was a degenerate criminal.

The pharmacology was identical.

This is not hypocrisy in the sense of Anslinger secretly knowing the distinction was false. It is something more commonplace: a man who genuinely believed in a moral framework that his own life quietly contradicted, and who was never called to account for the contradiction because the framework served the people with power to enforce it.

Sources

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