De Bianco on Harry Anslinger and Timothy Leary

Mitchell A. Del Bianco , a recent graduate of the University of Virginia 's J.D. and M.A. program in legal history, has posted A Bureaucrat Versus the Most Dangerous Man in America, which is forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of Criminal Law.

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Harry J. Anslinger (1930) (LC) This Article recounts how the policy ntrepreneurship of Harry J. Anslinger made federal drug enforcement policy and how his shadow loomed large over one of the twentieth century’s most flamboyant and notorious defendants: Dr. Timothy Leary, the countercultural provocateur branded by President Richard Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America.” Even after Leary’s Supreme Court victory struck down provisions of the Marihuana Tax Act, Anslinger’s legacy ensured that Leary, like many others, remained ensnared in a system built for the punishment of drug offenses.

Through the entwined stories of Anslinger and Leary, this Article reveals how individual bureaucrats can shape law and policy, harness administrative power, and outlast their own institutions. Far from being inevitable, America’s war on drugs emerged from the ambitions and idiosyncrasies of a bureaucrat who turned a small agency into a juggernaut.

--Dan Ernst