“Come and get your beer and benzedrine!” - Feral House

CHAPTER ONE
The modern temptation is to treat anslinger as a joke,
and he has even been made the subject of a campy musical,
but, at the time, there was nothing funny about his
propaganda campaign against “reefer madness”—fully
endorsed by newspaper baron William randolph Hearst.
The anslinger assault would shape the War on Drugs for
the rest of the twentieth century, and clear on into the
twenty-first, and be responsible for thousands of deaths,
millions of incarcerations, trillions in criminal profits,
the erosion and abuse of civil liberties, and an entire and
detrimental revision of the relationship between citizens
and those in authority. With Hearst’s help, anslinger attempted
to create a national (and even international) drug
hysteria with horror fantasies typified by this excerpt from
American Magazine:
“an entire family was murdered by a youthful addict
in Florida. When officers arrived at the home, they found
the youth staggering about in a human slaughterhouse.
With an axe he had killed his father, mother, two brothers,
and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze… He had no recollection
of having committed the multiple crimes.”
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