Reissue Ep. 184: DHP Villains: Harry Anslinger (CJ’s Presentation from the 2019 Midwest Peace & Liberty Fest)
The Dangerous History Podcast
CJ
4.6 • 647 Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2025
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(To celebrate 4/20, please enjoy this reissue of a DHP Episode from 2019.)
At the 2019 Midwest Peace & Liberty Fest in Delton, Mich., CJ took the occasion of Michigan’s recent legalization of marijuana to do a DHP Villains feature on the man who is arguably the most important of the Founding Fathers of the US government’s war on drugs.
Join CJ as he discusses the career of Harry J. Anslinger, from his early life to working for the State Department, then the Treasury Department, culminating in his tenure as first Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930-62, during which time (among other things) he presided over the beginning of the federal government’s criminalization of marijuana and the continuous amping-up of the drug war and its penalties; along the way we’ll also cover Anslinger’s racism & xenophobia, as well as his connections to the OSS and CIA, including lending those agencies some of his top agents for shady purposes, including some of the MK-Ultra experiments.
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The post Reissue Ep. 184: DHP Villains: Harry Anslinger (CJ’s Presentation from the 2019 Midwest Peace & Liberty Fest) first appeared on The Dangerous History Podcast.Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Howdy, everybody. This is CJ in 2025, wishing you and yours a very happy Easter and a very happy |
| 0:08.6 | 420. And I'm not sure how often Easter Sunday coincides with 420, but I would imagine it's not super common. |
| 0:16.8 | And it must bring a lot of joy to those, you know, sort of fringe Christian denominations |
| 0:23.2 | that are big into cannabis. |
| 0:26.7 | And if you've never heard of such things, check out the documentary Square Grupper by Billy Corbin, |
| 0:33.1 | the same guy that made Cocaine Cowboys much better known. |
| 0:36.1 | And you'll actually see some of these Christian churches that are also really big on |
| 0:42.4 | the pot. |
| 0:45.0 | In a moment, I'm going to turn it over to myself roughly six years ago. |
| 0:49.9 | In the summer of 2019, at the Midwest Peace and Liberty Fest in Michigan. |
| 0:55.6 | An event that I've attended and spoken at, I want to say three times, maybe four, but I think it's three. |
| 1:02.6 | And the last time I was there was summer of 2019, where I delivered a talk that was basically a live D.H.P. episode. A D.H.P. Villains Spotlight on Harry Anslinger, |
| 1:17.2 | whom you may know is really arguably the founding father of the U.S. government's war on drugs, |
| 1:23.9 | and especially its war on marijuana. And I decided to share this episode on the |
| 1:28.2 | public feed for a while and put it out today on 420 for obvious reasons. And also I wanted to |
| 1:35.0 | just remind everybody listening that I do, you know, go give talks and presentations and |
| 1:41.5 | things like this. I am available to be hired to do that sort of thing. |
| 1:45.4 | I haven't done very many lately because the last couple of years my schedule has been |
| 1:49.7 | kind of crazy and it hasn't always been possible for me to travel to go, you know, give talks |
| 1:55.3 | and be away from home for a weekend or whatever. But I am now able to do that. So if you are involved in any sort of |
| 2:04.4 | organization or event or whatever that is looking to hire speakers for a broadly defined, |
| 2:11.1 | you know, kind of libertarian audience, or at least libertarian leaning or sympathetic audience, |
... |
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