FACTOID #53: If you thought Antarctica was inhospitable, think again - its land area is only ninety-eight percent ice. Reassuringly, the other 2% is categorised as "barren rock".
Amid evidence of corruption in 1929, the US Treasury Department's Narcotics Division collapsed and the following year Congress created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), still under the Treasury Deparment. In June, 1930, Harry J. Anslinger was appointed its first and only commissioner by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon under President Herbert Hoover. The United States Department of the Treasury is a Cabinet department, a treasury, of the United States government established by an Act of U.S. Congress in 1789 to manage the revenue of the United States government. ... Harry J. Anslinger is commonly known for his extreme campaign against Cannabis. ... Mellon portrait Andrew William Mellon (March 24, 1855–August 27, 1937) was an American banker, industrialist, philanthropist, and Secretary of the Treasury from March 4, 1921 until February 12, 1932. ... Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) is best known as being the 31st (1929-1933) President of the United States. ...
Under Anslinger, the bureau lobbied for harsh penalties for drug usage. The FBN is credited for criminalizing drugs such as marijuana with the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, as well as strengthening the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. In the United States, the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act was one of the cornerstone bills that led to the criminalization of Cannabis. ... The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was an American law that regulated and taxed the production, importation, distribution and use of opiates. ...
The FBN is credited for criminalizing drugs such as cannabis with the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, as well as strengthening the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914.
Anslinger retired in 1962 and was succeeded by Henry Giordano, who was the commissioner of the FBN until it was merged with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control to form the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968.
The ascendancy of the narcotics agency within the federal government really began only in the final months of the Johnson administration, when it was decided to move the Bureau of Narcotics from the Treasury to the Justice Department.
Ingersoll found that the old Bureau of Narcotics, despite a flamboyant public image (which derived in large part from television series such as T-Men), lacked the intelligence-gathering means and techniques for disrupting the major channels of heroin distribution in the United States.
Geoffrey Sheppard, one of Krogh's young assistants, complained, "Those guys in the Bureau of Narcotics were creating hundreds of thousands of addicts on paper with their phoney statistics." But Ingersoll proved impervious to a barrage of phone calls from Krogh and his staff.
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