International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 148

A Brief Genealogy of Cannabis Policy in the United States
The cannabis question is an entirely different one for the states that have decided
to create laws to allow recreational use, namely Colorado, Oregon, Washington,
Alaska, Nevada, California, Maine, and Massachusetts. This is because these
initiatives are totally illegal according to the Preamble of the 1961 convention:
“Desiring to conclude a generally acceptable international convention replacing
existing treaties on narcotic drugs, limiting such drugs to medical and scientific
use, and providing for continuous international co-operation and control for the
achievement of such aims and objectives.” 91
The recreational use of cannabis has become—or rather, it has become once
more—an absolutely political matter, something that the precursors to global drug
control, who emerged in the United States with prohibitionist aspirations, had
sought to avoid.
This return to a drug-focused political dynamic is the result of citizen movements
that have been mobilizing for at least 40 years to put forward a different
version of the reasons behind the war on drugs. That fact that eight states in the
United States currently allow recreational use of cannabis represents the success of
their mobilization. To finish off this study, I will therefore call on a few arguments
that these associations have advanced in recent years to expose what in their view
are the true reasons behind the U.S.’ “war on drugs.”
In this genealogy of U.S. drug policy where it relates to cannabis, there are
three key figures who must be considered in an effort to understand the political
core of the issue of drugs in general, and of cannabis in particular, in the United
States: Harry Anslinger, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.
Anslinger, as we have seen, had already been an official at the Prohibition
Unit, the agency that tried to end alcohol use in the United States but fell far short
of fulfilling its objective, to the point that it disappeared when the U.S. Congress
put an end to the laws prohibiting alcohol.
Anslinger spent his life as a U.S. public official. From 1918 to 1926, he held
positions in U.S. embassies in the Netherlands, Germany, Venezuela, and the Bahamas.
In 1926, he became head of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Division of
Foreign Control, and in 1929, he was promoted to assistant commissioner of prohibition.
In 1930, he became commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics. 92
In July 1937 in issue 124 of America Magazine, Anslinger published an article
entitled “Marijuana, Assassin of Youth,” in which he set out the main arguments
justifying the Marijuana Tax Act, which was approved by Roosevelt that
year. He spoke of examples of young people who under the influence of cannabis
allegedly killed themselves or committed murder. This cannabis, the article
said, had reached the United States, where it spread at an incredible speed, from
91 Ibid.
92 https://www.trumanlibrary.org/hstpaper/anslinger.HTM#collect.
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