Cloth: 978-0-226-27697-7 | Electronic: 978-0-226-27702-8
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277028.001.0001
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ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Assassin of Youth, Alexandra Chasin gives us a lyrical, digressive, funny, and ultimately riveting quasi-biography of Anslinger. Her treatment of the man, his times, and the world that arose around and through him is part cultural history, part kaleidoscopic meditation. Each of the short chapters is anchored in a historical document—the court decision in Webb v. US (1925), a 1935 map of East Harlem, FBN training materials from the 1950s, a personal letter from the Treasury Department in 1985—each of which opens onto Anslinger and his context. From the Pharmacopeia of 1820 to death of Sandra Bland in 2015, from the Pennsylvania Railroad to the last passenger pigeon, and with forays into gangster lives, CIA operatives, and popular detective stories, Chasin covers impressive ground. Assassin of Youth is as riotous and loose a history of drug laws as can be imagined—and yet it culminates in an arresting and precise revision of the emergence of drug prohibition.
Today, even as marijuana is slowly being legalized, we still have not fully reckoned with the racist and xenophobic foundations of our cultural appetite for the severe punishment of drug offenders. In Assassin of Youth, Chasin shows us the deep, twisted roots of both our love and our hatred for drug prohibition.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
REVIEWS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
1. The Trouble with Harry
2. In a Word
3. The Square Last Mentioned
4. Maybe Born in Bern
5. A Willing and Cheerful Obedience Thereto
6. To Prohibit Vice is Not Ordinarily Considered within the Police Power of the State
7. Now Building at Altoona
8. In All Cases of Doubt or Uncertainty
9. Alcohol is a Poison
10. The Narcotic Element is the Siren
11. Lotus Eaters: Whosoever
12. The Education of Harry Anslinger
13. Horseplay Turns to Tragedy
14. A High-Priced Man: So Stupid that the Word "Percentage" has no meaning to him
15. Keystone State of Mind
16. The Harrison Act
17. Becoming a Fed
18. Only Words from which there is no Escape: Jin Fuey Moy
19. Not One Minute Darkness
20. Within the Words
21. I Would Not Endeavor to Descrive
22. On the Basis of Science
23. Human Wreckage: Wally Reid
24. Lotus Eaters: In Dolce Far Niente
25. Linder v. United States (1925), or Vice Versa
26. A Set of False Teeth in its Stomach
27. Prohibition as Substance: Putting the Bureau in Bureaucracy
28. The Federal Bureau of Politics: With Camel Hair Glued Over Them
29. A Plastic Palimpsest
30. The Collected Stories of Harry J. Anslinger
31. Funking the Necessary Immigrations
32. The Marijuana Tax Act
33. The Unbridled Powers of a Czar
34. Anslinger Nation, or Double Agency
35. Fiction Alone has no Monopoly in this Field: Real Detective Stories
36. This Fellow Ought to be the Figment of Somebody's Imagination
37. In Doctor Nation
38. Spindoctrination
39. The World's Leading Authority
40. The Oriental Communists had a Twofold Purpose
41. Lotus Eaters: 1953, or the Imponderabilia of Actual Life
42. Dr. John Blank
43. Chasing the Ghostwriters
44. Every Inch a Man
45. Out with a Whimper
Epilogue
46. Chasing the Ghost
47. Toward a Poetics of Drug Policy
48. Lotus Eaters: Charadrius Dubius
Acknowledgments
Backlit By
Notes