International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 149

International Journal on Criminology
Mexico. The article is skillfully written and honest to a certain extent, as in its introductory
paragraphs Anslinger explains that in reality, one can only speculate
about the murders, suicides, thefts, criminal acts of violence, burglaries, and acts
of manic insanity that cannabis may cause each year, especially among the young. 93
Nevertheless, the length of and the many details contained in its highly speculative
passages ultimately convince the reader.
It is a text built around a single main idea that is designed to provoke an
emotional response from the reader. This emotion is supposed to make the reader
as a citizen feel compelled to demand on a political level what Anslinger suggests
should be done: preventing cannabis from coming into young people’s hands to
prevent crime. The best means of achieving this? Creating prohibition laws. And
how can this be done? Anslinger requests the support of the reader so that his
proposal is passed.
It seems that we do not have a very detailed understanding of Anslinger’s
intellectual training, but the way in which he presents his ideas brings to mind
Walter Lippmann, a figure considered one of the fathers of neoliberalism. In his
book Public Opinion, which became very influential at the time in the United
States, Lippmann turns as a basis for his explanations to arguments that have been
widely debated in political writings since the era of ancient Greece to the effect
that the general interest goes beyond the way in which it is expressed by public
opinion and can only be properly managed by a class of specialist citizens whose
particular interests go well beyond the local level. From Lippmann’s perspective,
the citizen is a deaf spectator sat on the back row. Absorbed by their alternating
between work and entertainment, supposed citizens have neither the desire, nor
the competence, nor the virtue to take care of public affairs. The exercise of democracy
must therefore be entrusted to a specialist and informed class—a political
elite. Clearly, the little people are eclipsed by the great; amateurs let professionals
get on with the job. 94
During the era when these new laws prohibiting cannabis in the United
States were being created, the country was still undergoing a process of consolidation,
with both the world and the United States recovering from the worst economic
crisis that the West had ever known. The political effects of the crisis became
visibly clear with the emergence of European dictatorships that in their own way
of communicating about drugs fell very much in line with Lippmann’s arguments.
For example, in Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, Norman Ohler 95 explains how
the Nazi regime, at the same time as it used amphetamines ordered from its pharmaceutical
industry on a massive scale 96 to win its wars via blitzkrieg, by contrast
93 [FOOTNOTE TEXT MISSING IN ORIGINAL VERSION]
94 http://wps.pearsoncustom.com/wps/media/objects/2429/2487430/pdfs/lippmann.pdf.
95 Ohler, Blitzed.
96 The pharmaceutical company Bayer supplied Hitler’s army with an amphetamine of its own inven-
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