Weed War Origin Heavily Racist

...but was it secretly a NAZI plot?

WWI-WWII Government Document Trove Discovered at PSU Library Hints at Sinister Deception

The State of Hawaii recently banned official use of the word “mari-uana,” replacing it with the botanical term “cannabis” instead, owing to past racism associated with the old word.  When the State’s legislators passed the bill, however, they may have only been partially aware of exactly how racist the first cannabis bans really were.  

Recently re-examined US Treasury and State Department archives, stolen from Uncle Sam by a career civil servant in the 1960s, suggest a link between Reefer Madness architects and enemy German espionage agents from the WWI and II-eras.  

The stolen documents are the archives of cannabis Prohibition architect Harry J. Anslinger, who inexplicably took his office’s government documents and physical items home with him after being fired by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 after a career of more than 30 years.  The papers were relegated to the archival record room of Penn State University upon Anslinger’s death as per his will, though they are in fact Treasury and State Department (i.e. public) property properly belonging to the US federal archival record system.  And the records indicate anti-US espionage on behalf of enemy German wartime interests, when held up against the light of the era’s other historical facts.

Hawaii’s legal name change in the US’ most multi-cultural State re-kindled an old debate: exactly how racist the War on Weed, and the word “mari-uana” really were at their origins.  But it is also fanning the flames of a newly growing debate about reefer and racism: whether the stolen Anslinger documents show a likelihood that Prohibition was actually an enemy German WWI-WWII plot to weaken US war readiness

Dr. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow rocked American liberalism when it traced the racism of the modern Drug War (including “legalization” and cannabis sales licenses) to its Reefer Madness racist roots, and forward in time to the new institutional racism of licensed weed stores.  Dr. Alexander taught middle white liberal American  how unconsciously White Privileged and institutionally racist they really were, even when “legalizing” --  i.e. allowing well-to-do people to have exclusive licenses  --  leaving others to still suffer the same racially biased law enforcement as if Prohibition had never ended.

Now, with new focus on the war’s racist origins, scrutiny of the archival records of the US and global cannabis ban author Harry J. Anslinger, exhibited below, shows that truly disturbing associations with racial supremacy, overt enemy German NAZIsm and heavy espionage can be found among the cannabis ban’s main, original proponents.   

Anslinger’s own files, in the form of a virtual confession to being a NAZI spy at the top ranks of the US State and Treasury Departments, appear to be corroborated by outside historical facts.  Given that the two waves of American cannabis Prohibition occurred around WWI, and WWII, society must examine the possibility that the ban was an attempt to weaken US War readiness by depriving mainstay medicines and textile fiber sources crucial to the war effort.

The word “mari-uana” really is racist

According to PA hemp historian Les Stark, the origin of the M-word is lost in time, probably Chinese, Mexican Native, or Spanish origin, or some synthesis thereof.  Stark correctly points out that the word cannot be said with certainty to have been originally pejorative per se.  Nonetheless, the word has terrible racial connotations, because most Americans first heard the word in the most racist of contexts.

Anslinger’s propaganda war demonized Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims and Hindus for using ‘loco-weed” in religious and self-medication contexts, and the then-common medicinal cannabis plant was demonized by association.  Americans at the time were familiar enough with the plant as a common medicine and fiber crop  --  its use in American medicine was so common that for the era’s physicians, pharmacists and even veterinarians’ licensure exams typically required test-takers to know cannabis oil extraction and dosing.  When Anslinger’s Prohibition bill was debated by Congress, the American Medical Association opposed the legislation, advising that cannabis was an important mainstay medicine.  

Anslinger said outrageously racist things, for example that a probably-fake wave of new Black crime was virtually all due to “mari-uana use”, and that it “killed the soul” of users.  Americans at the time generally did not even know he was referring to the common cannabis plant, and had never heard the “M-word” before, despite counterculture use of the word among outcast artists and musicians, non-derogatorily.  It really is a mis-spelled foreign slang word, used derogatorily in Mexico even before the propaganda, and to this day, no country in the world, besides the US, calls the plant “mari-uana” in law  --  not even Mexico.

By the standards used to today argue that the word was not racist, it would be o.k. to continue using the word “N-gro” or “Col-red” for Black Americans.  It really is racist.  Those who argue that its use should be allowed, like the millions of Black Americans who casually say “N-gger” as a way to “reclaim” language, have every right to call it that word  -- but this does not change its origins in American English, which were racist.

Some say racism was just part of America in the 1930s, when the ban went nation-wide, and that the ban is no more racist than other laws  -- but its effect in the modern world is one of neo-slavery upon Blacks, the so-called “New Jim Crow”  --  even where it is legalized, the monopoly-like licenses are awarded almost solely to whites.  

While bad racism was rampant in the 1930s, it was also condemned by large segments of society even then, who noticed the alarming rise of NAZIsm in Europe associated with it.  Considerable amounts of newly uncovered government documentary evidence, some of which is shown below, links the original cannabis ban’s racism to overt NAZI ideology and covert NAZI espionage against the US.

The Anslinger-NAZI Connection Evidence

Below, archival evidence will be presented of the following pieces of evidence that Anslinger and his cannabis ban were a NAZI plot

1. NAZI symbols and a new NAZI-affiliated Secret Society crop up at PSU during Anslinger’s short time there  

1. Anslinger’s improbable personal relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm in WWI

1. Anslinger’s mysterious whereabouts during WWI US espionage assignments.

1. Anslinger’s dopple-ganger in the German Air Force

1. Anslinger’s 1950s-1960s 2nd-in-command at the Federal Narcotics Bureau boasted of using NAZI behavior control techniques on US civilians

1. Anslinger openly delighted in cover-ups of corrupt police abuse (including murder and torture) of non-whites

1. Anslinger’s apparent written NAZI spy confession ties it all together
   
   

• NAZI Symbols and NAZI-Affiliated Secret Society arise at Penn State University during Anslinger’s studies there.

Harry J. Anslinger was a student of the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU), although it is unclear how much time he actually spent on campus versus studying via correspondence, or whether he graduated with the Class of 1914 or 1915, since sources list alternate years.  Irrespective of that, the PSU student yearbook for the Class of 1914, published in 1915 with reference to that class as well, shows a lit-up NAZI-style swastika and letter “A.”  

While this symbol was not formally associated by historians with NAZIsm or racial supremacy until almost 10 years later, its presence is alarming, especially when viewed in light of Anslinger’s other NAZI-related career paths.

Also, in 1914, PSU became home to a branch of a strange secret society called Skull and Bones.  This group, like the later NAZI SS group, used a skull and bones logo, and has been implicated in global opium trafficking (including convincing the British Crown government to launch the “Opium Wars” to protect their investments), and to NAZI investments by the immediate family of Yale chapter Bonesmen from the family of Presidents George HW and George W Bush. The club’s 1914 appearance at PSU, just as a swastika-and-letter-A logo lit up Anslinger’s graduation, is deeply alarming in view of other connections to Anslinger and NAZism.

• Anslinger had an inexplicable personal relationship with enemy Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm in WWI, and smuggled items

The US State Department ordered (1) Harry J. Anslinger, of all people, to negotiate secretly with Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm at the end of WWI.

Anslinger was a mere 26 year-old recent correspondence college graduate whose pre-War work experience was only as a railyard detective, investigating accidents and roughing up freeloading hobos. Why Anslinger was chosen for this delicate work remains a mystery, but he and the Kaiser were so close that Anslinger took the Kaiser’s personal effects home with him after the War (when they should have been State Department property), later donating some of them to the Smithsonian Institute -- probably for tax credit  --  when they were not rightly his.

• Anslinger was a WWI US State Department spy, and crossed enemy borders easily during wartime

Historian John McWilliams notes that in WWI,Harry Anslinger readily crossed closed enemy borders by impersonating a Dutch (neutral) intelligence officer, often by sheer bluster (2).  Anslinger was a fluent German speaker born of first-generation Swiss-German immigrants, and his nephew Bill readily admitted to the DEA that his father was a WWI US spy.  The source of young Bill’s information, a document in his uncle’s archives, however, contains a virtual confession of enemy spying, and will be displayed and examined in greater detail below, solving many puzzles about Anslinger in one fell swoop.

As it turns out, it may have been more than mere bluster that got Harry into and out of Germany with ease.  He may have had a German source of ID documents  -- Imperial Air Force Lt. Leopold Anslinger.

• Anslinger had a namesake in the Imperial German Air Force

Although Harry Anslinger does not appear visually similar to the Imperial German Air Force’s high ranking fighter ace Leftnant Leopold Anslinger, they both appear to have male pattern baldness, and both share the same relatively rare last name.  The above-mentioned document cited by Anslinger’s nephew Bill to the DEA as proof of Anslinger’s spying also shows an impossible wartime emergency crossing of the English Channel.  If Anslinger was being ferried by his namesake by air, in an era prior to anti-aircraft fire, it would finally explain how Harry J. Anslinger made the secret middle-of-the-night Channel crossing (from the spy proof cited by nephew Bill) undetected.  Soon, we will show and directly examine that document, but not before more suspicious NAZI-related Anslinger activity is presented.

• Anslinger’s 2nd-in-Command at the Federal Narcotics Bureau was a top US spy who bragged about deploying NAZI behavior control tactics against civilians

Det. George White was Anslinger’s second in command at the Narcotic Bureau he headed, and White was one of the United States’ historically dirtiest lawmen, ever.  Det. White not only trained and founded the CIA’s first counter-espionage unit, but he did so using NAZI-like techniques, detailed below,  which he later deployed against unwitting American civilians, ultimately bragging about it in his CIA retirement letter (3).

What exactly was so NAZI-ish about Det. George White’s tactics?

First, he, like Anslinger, was quick to impersonate other people.  His main alias, Morgan Hall, was an opiate kingpin who sold drugs, then had the buyers arrested when it suited him.  As Morgan Hall, Det. White drugged unwitting civilians for fun, claiming he was doing Mind Control research for the CIA and getting paid to do so.  He recruited his subjects from vulnerable prostitutes and drug addicts, who he busted and sweated, for “get out of jail” credit, over and over again, while occasionally raping his hapless victims.  As Det. White, he killed numerous suspects, and as Morgan, is suspected of killing unknown civilians.

The CIA’s forerunner, OSS where George White was a high-ranking founder, is known to have obtained files and personnel from NAZI infrastructure at the end of WWII, in a failed prisoner swap known as “Operation Paperclip.”  It is suspected that the US Government’s foolhardy foray into mind control research, through the now-declassified-and-condemned so-called “MK-Ultra” program under which White operated, came from NAZI behavior control research and scientists.  

Regardless of whether or not the direct NAZI connection to MK-Ultra is true, Det. White’s nightmarish drugging, brainwashing, rapinf and killing of civilians certainly rings of NAZish behavior such as sick “medical” experiments, mind control, and human trafficking.  Sadly, Det. White is known to have roped in New York and San Francisco-area judges, prosecutors and police into his scheme, under guise of national security leak control, and quite likely feeding into the vice squad corruption plaguing major US cities to this day, and effectively burying most records and leaks of his foul projects.

• Anslinger Appeared to Delight in Police Torture/Killing of non-Whites, and in Inventing Racism-Inflaming Fake Crime News

Anslinger has often been accused of citing violent crime sprees by Blacks of which there is no actual record, sparking suspicions that he simply made them up.  His stolen Government records show that he not only expressly fictionalized such accounts, in his own hand, but that he also effectively assisted in, and normalized, the cover-up of torture and murder of non-Whites by police in the name of cannabis prohibition

“Immense” is the best adjective to describe the volumes of government papers Anslinger stole, and took home, from the Treasury Department upon his 1963 firing by JFK, but one small file therein, called “Police Reports” tells us all we need to know about the depths of Anslinger’s cruelty in racial politics, and whether or not he invented fake race-baiting crime cases allegedly committed against whites by other ethnicities/races.  As the documents below will show, Anslinger certainly did make those cases up, while covering up some of the worst police abuse crimes ever recorded, against non-white cannabis suspects.

The following pages contain written depiction of horrendous violence, some clearly fictional, and some (against non-Whites by racist police) all too real.  Readers are advised to proceed with caution.

The first case is that of Miguel Henriquez, a Latino grocer alleged to have been selling 25-cent cannabis cigarettes in New Orleans.  While the police account is totally discredible, the victim is very likely a real person tortured and murdered by the police  --  please read the account with respect for the short life and eternal soul of the late Mr. Henriquez.

Police claimed that when faced with arrest, the 40 year old Miguel Henriquez

• fired 5 point blank gunshots at his abdomen with 2 policemen restraining him
• threw himself down a set of stairs
• stabbed himself 3 times with a butcher knife in the chest, while wrestling officers
• tore Det. Rudy Slicho’s coat
• obtained an icepick and threatened to kill himself with it
• jumped over fences to make his escape, bleeding, never to be seen again

In all likelihood, the suspect was murdered by police after refusing to cooperate, or otherwise dissatisfying them, during torture, and his body dumped in the nearby Mississippi River, and a story concocted to explain the commotion, wounds and blood trail.  No reasonable person could possibly believe the police report as stated  - it implies torture, murder and coverup.  Anslinger’s celebration of such police reports, as a top-ranked federal lawman sworn to enforce federal laws and Constitutional rights against kidnaping and race-based murder, as tantamount to participation via boosted cover-up, and incitement for more such behavior from the obviously-guilty police.   But this is far from the only such case in Anslinger’s file, even if the most absurd  -  his files are full of such dubious reports, reeking of abuse and cover-up, and rife with, as will be seen in the next examples, deliberate attempts to whoop up racial hatred in the context of cannabis.

While the author of this hand-cut passage from Anslinger’s typewriter is unknown, its inclusion in his police reports files is damning.

Anslinger frequently and dishonestly used sexual fears to boost his racist and anti-cannabis message’s potency among frightened audiences.  The next example shows a handwritten Anslinger tale of 2 “Negros” allegedly kidnapping a very young (and presumably white) girl and keeping her addicted to cannabis to prostitute/pimp her.  No such story happened, else it would be in print somewhere.  It exists only in Anslinger’s imagination and handwriting.

Anslinger frequently embellished his crime story fake news on-the-fly, leaving a set of proofs that he fictionalized the accounts, by his hand-written or type-over edits.  The next 2 examples show Anslinger race-bait stories, mid-edit, in a way that shows how he embellished for fear’s sake, and casting doubt on every fact he ever cited.

In the next example, possibly a speech Anslinger was drafting, he can be seen removing a section even he knew was going too far, stretching credibility and exposing him as a race-baiting liar.

The dishonest racial propaganda displayed in these Anslinger clippings do not bode well for those arguing he was not a NAZI, but the most damning evidence comes from what appears to be a written confession.

• Anslinger’s Written Confession

The Anslinger files contain a folder called “speeches,” many of which contain biographical sections (perhaps meant to be used as introductions) clearly written by Anslinger about himself in the 3rd person.  Such writing was a hallmark of his work, and has a distinctive flavor or style that is Anslinger’s own, unmistakable to anyone familiar with his writings.

Another file, perhaps the archive’s most important one, however, is labelled ‘Personal Anecdotes,” and contains one highly unusual document, what appears to be a speech introduction about Anslinger, written on his own typewriter, in his peculiar style.  And it says he was friendly with NAZI spies, in England, during WWI, and inarguably implies he had a secret nocturnal manner of crossing the English Channel.  And it says he had a penchant for playing for the opposite side than the one to which he was nominally attached.  The document, labelled “Humorous Incidents” is reproduced above

Anslinger never crossed the English Channel on such a mission with 14 Destroyers escorting him, meaning he had to have crossed another way.  

It is suggested that Imperial German Air Force  fighter ace Lt. Leopold Anslinger was both his transport and the friendly German spy in London of whom Anslinger wrote.  In either case, his association with a friendly German spy, in England, is clearly evident in the document, as is his ironic assistance of the opponents’ goals.

Why Would NAZIs Care About Cannabis?

Cannabis is not normally considered a NAZI concern.

To some, this might actually seem surprising, given that the NAZI war machine was inextricably intertwined with German Pharmaceutical-Industrial concerns like Bayer, and was fuelled by drug sales and use (e.g amphetamines and cocaine) so much that some historians have deemed the NAZI party  a “drug cult.”  The infamous SS branch of the war machine even bore a Skull and Bones logo similar to the one adopted by the Secret Society at Yale, and later, Penn State, which has been suspected of opiate trafficking for more than century.

Whatever drugs the NAZIs preferred, cannabis was not one of them. Unlike methamphetamine, opiates and cocaine, the active and/or medicinal components of cannabis could not be refined well into patentable pure crystalline form  -- cannabis medicine is oil-based, and its purest form is ultimately a rough tarry, gooey mass outside the German model of tidy, perfectly snow-white powders, which, while potentially easy to make, mystified the public as to how they were made, and seemed the provenance of incredibly brilliant doctors alone (though many of the pharmaceutical products were made from plants long-used, in cruder forms, the same way).  Simply put, cannabis would not yield up a patentable, public-mystifiable white crystal the way the other plants would, and so industrialist were happy to see it replaced with more expensive medicines which could.

There were other problems with cannabis, for the NAZIs, however.  It was said to make non-whites delusionally think they were equal to whites, even to the point of looking them in the eye.  This is the reason racist policy-makers like Anslinger wrongly labelled the plant an hallucinogen (it caases hallucination more rarely than cocaine, alcohol, meth or opiates, which are not labelled as hallucinogens).  It was not the equality-seeing cannabis users who were delusional, however.

In the end, the real reason for the US cannabis ban (unheard of prior to then, and inconceivable) was that cannabis medicine and hemp are truly essential to a country’s war readiness, or defense capability.  To this day, hemp rope is used for naval purposes because it outlasts plastic rope.  In the WWII era, it was needed for uniforms and parachute rigging, such that emergency hemp growing programs were launched by the Agriculture Department through 4-H clubs.  And, as mentioned, it was truly a mainstay medicine known and used by all doctors, pharmacists and veterinarians.  To go to war without that medicine, and without hemp, was foolhardy, and yet the 2 waves of State cannabis prohibition occurred at WWI and at WWII, unmistakably.  This cannot be a coincidence, especially since the first ban, California’s imposed separate classifications for 2 plants, one it called “cannabis” (requiring taxes of medicinal sales), and the other outright banning a seemingly separate plant called “marawana” (sic).  The ban as totally dishonest from the outset, was incredibly racist, and appears to have served as an enemy German plot to weaken US war readiness, while undermining racial equality, furthered by one the US Treasury and State Department’s highest-ranking lawmen, a racist Deutsche- American first generation immigrant.

Conclusion

Cannabis laws are still rife with institutional racism, especially where “legalized” under heavily restricted monopolistic grow licenses, leaving draconian penalties in place.  Cries of racism and NAZism echo around cannabis policy to this day, so badly, for example, that in mid-August 2017, the anti-racism group “Antifa” threatened violence against Rev. Dr. Anne Armstrong (a grandmother asked to read Drug War prisoner poetry at the Kennedy Center) because of the woman’s affiliation with pro-Life, pro-Christian causes which some racists supported in the past  -- only to have the Kennedy Center call the Antifa group “NAZIs” for their attempt to influence free speech.

Shockingly, Narcotics Bureau rogue Det. George White, and the early CIA with whom he worked, were aware that cannabis was an excellent truth serum,  and left copious records that it worked better than sodium pentothal or scopolamine.  White slipped cannabis extracts to suspects whenever he felt like it, because it worked.  It is no wonder that NAZIs have learned to shun cannabis  -- racism is not compatible with truth and honesty.




End Notes / Citations


1. Lansing, Robert, Secretary of State..  “Order" to Harry J. Anslinger, File "Correspondence 1921," Box 3, AP., as cited in McWilliams, John C. Unsung partner against crime: Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1962.  The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography; CXIII, No 2 (April 1989), pp 212-213.

2. McWilliams, John C. Unsung partner against crime: Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1962.  The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography; CXIII, No 2 (April 1989), pp 212-213.

3. Jacobs, John J. The diaries of a CIA operative.  The Washington Post (Sept 5, 1977), p. A1