Why exactly did the US go so crazy against drugs? Seems like after WWII this war on drugs mentality took root and probably peaked in the 1980s or so with the peak of the WWII generation's power.
> Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters.
> Anslinger collected dubious anecdotes of marijuana causing crime and violence, and ignored contrary evidence such as doctor Walter Bromberg, who pointed out that substance abuse and crime are heavily confounded and that none of a group of 2,216 criminal convictions he examined were clearly done under marijuana's influence,[9] or a discussion forwarded to him by the American Medical Association in which 29 of 30 pharmacists and drug industry representatives objected to his proposals to ban marijuana. One such statement claimed that the proposal was "Absolute rot. It is not necessary. I have never known of its misuse.", although only the single dissenter (who noted he had once encountered a doctor who had been addicted to marijuana) was preserved in Bureau files.
Anslinger might be even worse though, because while we recognise the other three as clearly evil (or at least their acts as atrocious), his views are still held as good moral standards by societies around the globe.
The Nixon-era War on Drugs:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
[0] See https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman for the direct quote
For context, that's a direct quote from John Ehrlichman who "was counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs" under Nixon when Nixon declared the war on drugs. Everything kind of snow-balled from there.
According to the chronology provided by PBS [1], perhaps the first groundwork was put in place by LBJ founding the "Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs" in 1968 (campaign year that Nixon won), the timing of which correlates with Nixon's successful campaigning on a "theme to restore 'law and order'"[2].
[0] https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/cron/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidentia...