2022] RACIST ROOTS 463
“think they’re as good as white men.”
52
Scholars attribute other insidious
quotes to Anslinger that amply demonstrate the role racism played at the
very beginning of the WOD: 1) “the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is
its effect on the degenerate races;” 2) “Negros, Hispanics, Filipinos, and
entertainers” constitute the main users of cannabis and “[t]heir Satanic mu-
sic, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use;” and 3) “the major criminal
in the United States is the drug addict . . . .”
53
Ultimately, Anslinger’s Feder-
al Bureau of Narcotics provoked almost entirely the Marihuana Tax Act of
1937,
54
the nation’s first federal cannabis enforcement effort, untethered to
any scientific evidence or law enforcement necessity.
55
Similarly, Harrison Wright, appointed first Opium Commissioner dur-
ing the Theodore Roosevelt Administration, lobbied in favor of the Harrison
Narcotics Act and attributed opium use to increased sexual relations be-
tween white women and Chinese users.
56
Indeed, the first federal interven-
tion into narcotics markets (including opiates such as heroin) relied upon
racist rhetoric to drive both its public support and its movement into law.
57
“Racial minorities have always been the target of the harshest drug laws.”
58
Nixon understood from history that harsh narcotics laws could demon-
ize and disempower the growing minority vote.
59
Thus, the very root of Nix-
on claiming a war on drug abuse was to criminalize black Americans and
52
. Sarah Sloat, Nixon Advisor Admitted the Obvious: War on Drugs was a War on
Blacks and Hippies, I
NVERSE (Mar. 16, 2020), https://www.inverse.com/article/13153-nixon-
advisor-admitted-the-obvious-war-on-drugs-was-a-war-on-blacks-and-hippies; see Jessie
Daniels, Julie C. Netherland, and Alyssa Patricia Lyons, White Women, U.S. Popular Cul-
ture, and Narratives of Addiction, 45 CUNY J.
ACADEMIC WORKS 332 (2018).
53. Michelle H. Walton, Book Note, 11 ALB. GOV’T L. REV. 82, 89 (2017) (reviewing
ROBERT MIKOS, MARIJUANA LAW, POLICY, AND AUTHORITY (2017)).
54. Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, Pub. L. No. 75-238, 50 Stat. 551, invalidated by Leary
v. United States, 395 U.S. 6 (1969) (imposing tax on various marijuana-related transactions).
55
. RICHARD J. BONNIE & CHARLES A. WHITEHEAD II, THE MARIHUANA CONVICTION 127
(1977).
56. Provine, supra note 4, at 43.
57
. “The earliest U.S. drug laws were tied to racist stereotypes and to fears about the
negative habits of immigrants.” Michael L. Rosino & Matthew W. Hughey, The War on
Drugs, Racial Meanings, and Structural Racism: A Holistic and Reproductive Approach, 77
A
M. J. ECON. & SOC. 849, 850 (2018). Rosino & Hughey take an innovative, holistic ap-
proach to quantifying the role of race in the propagation of the WOD. Id. at 849. Specifically,
they review 30 years of media content (1983-2014) and find that “dominant racial meanings,
manifest in both racial identity and racial ideology, work as a symbolic resource that people
marshal to form a sense of self and rationalize or misconstrue structural racism” such as the
WOD. Id. at 881.
58. UNEQUAL UNDER LAW, supra note 33, at 3.
59. According to H.R. Haldeman’s diary, Nixon told Haldeman: “the whole problem is
really the blacks.” B
AUM, supra note 20, at 12.