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The Federal Bureau of Narcotics was the U.S. government’s drug enforcement agency from 1930 to 1968. Harry Anslinger directed the bureau for nearly this entire period.
Federal Bureau of Narcotics Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Federal Bureau of Narcotics or refer to Federal Bureau of Narcotics. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
Anslinger had his story now. He announced on a famous radio address: “Parents beware! Your children…are being introduced to a new danger in the form of a drugged cigarette, marijuana. Young [people] are slaves to this narcotic, continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally, become insane, [and] turn to violent crime and murder.”
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Chapter 8
Quotes
Harry Anslinger employed Joe Arpaio in 1957 to be an agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and he rose through the bureau over decades. Since 1993, he has been the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He was eighty when I met him, and about to be elected to his sixth consecutive term. His Stetson, his shining yellow lawmaker’s badge, and his sneer have become national symbols of a particular kind of funhouse-mirror Americana, and his hefty chunk of Arizona, home to nearly four million people, is now Harry Anslinger’s last great laboratory. Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,” and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony for them in the desert.
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Federal Bureau of Narcotics Term Timeline in Chasing the Scream
The timeline below shows where the term Federal Bureau of Narcotics appears in Chasing the Scream. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: The Black Hand
...haunting song about lynching that helped launch the civil rights movement. Then, Harry Anslinger’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics started harassing her—and eventually helped to kill her.
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When Anslinger took over the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the old Department of Prohibition, he had a tiny office and virtually no...
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...a wealthy, well-connected family that got him his job at the helm of the struggling Bureau of Narcotics.
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To get more resources for the Bureau, Anslinger decided to wage war on marijuana, which was disproportionately used by Black and Mexican...
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...Anslinger’s plan worked: the public was frightened, and the government started pouring money into the Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger’s campaign was also based around racism: he publicly claimed that marijuana would...
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Chapter 2: Sunshine and Weaklings
...crime. The city government celebrated Williams’s success—but Harry Anslinger was furious at him. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics started shutting down addiction clinics around the U.S. Many of Edward Williams’s former...
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In 1938, Henry Williams published a book suggesting that the Bureau was shutting down addiction clinics in exchange for huge bribes from criminal drug gangs. But...
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Chapter 3: The Barrel of Harry’s Gun
...the Chinese were shipping heroin to the U.S. to turn addicts into communists. Even though Bureau agents proved that this was false, Anslinger kept saying it because he knew that the...
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Anslinger retired in the 1960s, after running the Bureau of Narcotics for more than three decades. Ironically, federal investigators concluded that the corrupt Bureau...
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