Anslinger had succeeded in creating a major new market demand for a product that easily could be cultivated in Mexico. But Anslinger’s impact south of the Río Bravo was far greater: he proceeded to intervene directly and heavy-handedly in Mexican affairs, contributing mightily to a fateful turn of events.
In 1937, drug policy and its enforcement in Mexico was still, as since Carranza’s day, in the hands of the public health department — Cárdenas having refused to shift it to the attorney general’s purview — and the health authorities now headed off in a direction diametrically opposite to that of Anslinger. Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, head of the Federal Narcotics Service (part of the health department), was a physician highly regarded for his years of work in Mexico City’s Hospital for Drug Addicts, and his extensive research into the effects of drugs. In October 1938 he published a paper entitled “The Myth of Marijuana.” He argued that it was a relatively innocuous substance; that it did not (contrary to popular and scientific belief) induce psychosis or provoke violent, criminal behavior; and that Mexico should repeal its prohibition. Instead, the state should establish a government-regulated monopoly on drug distribution, cutting out the criminals by authorizing official dispensaries (or state-licensed physicians) to give addicts maintenance doses at cost. He also called for a public health campaign to educate people about truly dangerous drugs (notably alcohol), and for an expansion of the drug-treatment system. He openly criticized U.S. anti-drug policy as inappropriately punitive and inherently unworkable: “It is impossible to break up the traffic in drugs,” he declared, “because of the corruption of the police and special agents and because of the wealth and political influence of some of the traffickers.” Public health authorities backed his proposal, and the first clinics were opened.
Anslinger hit the roof and struck back fast, imposing (as his office was empowered to do) an embargo on the export of all medicinal drugs to Mexico.5 He also launched a campaign to discredit Salazar Viniegra, saying his plan was “fantastic” and “amoral,” and insisting that drug addiction was not an illness to be treated but an “evil” that “should be rooted out and destroyed.” Given inherited anti-marijuana attitudes prevalent in elite Mexican circles, Anslinger’s assault gained traction, especially after he wheeled in the U.S. State Department to apply additional pressure. In short order the clinics and the legalization regime were snuffed out.
Anslinger also contained a brush fire closer to home. In 1938, soon after marijuana was proscribed, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who had been a vigorous opponent of Prohibition, commissioned a study of the drug by the prestigious New York Academy of Medicine. After extensive study, its very distinguished Marihuana Committee concluded (as had Salazar Viniegra) that the drug was not connected to crime, violence, or sexual predation. Nor was there any evidence (pace Anslinger) that it was being peddled to schoolchildren. Nor was it addictive; indeed they thought it might prove useful in withdrawing from other truly harmful addictions. Completed by 1941, the report was published in 1944. La Guardia might have used its findings to call for reconsidering the 1937 law, but the wartime mayor had far more pressing issues to deal with, and did not follow up. Anslinger was left in possession of the federal field.6
3 The commissioner’s scrapbook of horror stories included many that had first been published in the Mexican Herald, an English-language newspaper in Mexico City, and were then picked up (as the Herald had an Associated Press franchise) and circulated by sensationalist papers in the United States. Anslinger did, however, tailor his alarmism to North American anxieties, arguing that marijuana released sexual inhibitions, and led to rape as well as murder.
4 South of the border, the Chinese were also subjected to forced removal during the Depression, evicted from the opium business by Mexicans long envious of their prosperity. The process had begun in the 1920s, when Calles and prominent politicians had backed a xenophobic campaign whipped up by the Mexican press. It picked up steam after the crash and Repeal with a wave of expropriatory racial violence, packing Asians into boxcars, shipping them out of state, and taking over their homes, property, and businesses.
5 Anslinger later played the embargo card against Cuba, with more justification, when it seemed Batista might allow Lucky Luciano to stay in Havana. Luciano had come there from Sicilian exile in hopes of working with Meyer Lansky and others to make Cuba a major way station in a revived post-war heroin trade. Batista caved and sent the capo packing.
6 And soon, as Carruth and Rowe note, with the arrival of the Cold War, Anslinger tied narcotic addiction to the Red Menace, and doubled the FBN’s budget in five years.
CHAPTER TWO. 1940s–1950s
During World War II, Sinaloan opium output rose dramatically. Some say the U.S. prevailed on the Mexican government to give free rein to gomeros in order to procure morphine for wounded soldiers, the traditional supply line from Turkey having been severed. Others insist there is no evidence of such a deal, but agree that the trade certainly bloomed, as did the production of hemp, great quantities of which were needed for rope and cordage and other uses. Marijuana output declined after the war, but the opium trade continued to flourish into the fifties, and indeed its operators began to descend from their former mountain fastness. To market their crop, campesino entrepreneurs set up shop in Culiacán, capital of Sinaloa. Violent confrontations began to emerge between traffickers, or against the police, the town becoming (local papers worried) “a new Chicago with gangsters in sandals.”
Partly in response to provincial disorder, partly heeding U.S. complaints about the post-war growth in drug trafficking, the PRI — under President Miguel Alemán (1946–1952) — broke with Cárdenas’ public health approach and moved decisively toward a punitive prohibitionist regime, and one, moreover, that gathered law enforcement into federal hands. In 1947, Miguel Alemán moved anti-drug enforcement into the PGR, the Procuraduría General de la República (attorney general’s office) and its subsidiary enforcement arm the Policía Judicial Federal (Federal Judicial Police [PJF]).
It quickly became apparent, however, that PRI honchos and their PGR agents had no intention of striving to eliminate the drug business. Rather they adopted a centralized version of what local caciques had been doing, establishing something of a public-private partnership. The federal police would take over the business of riding herd on narcotic operators — coordinating, steering, and containing their increasing propensity to compete by violent means. At the same time (a far from merely incidental benefit) they would generate a regular income for the state while also providing for their own pockets and for those of their PGR superiors, and so on up the ladder to the political authorities near or at the apex of the party structure. The PRI would seek not to extirpate but regulate — to establish a (profitable) “Pax Priista.”