Anslinger was one of the men who had tried to make Prohibition work.  As U.S. Consul to the Bahamas in 1926, he had browbeaten the British into clamping down on the rampant liquor traffic across the Straits of Florida.  As head of the Prohibition Unit’s foreign control division, he had forced similar treaties down the throats of the Canadians and Cubans.  And he had created a vast intelligence network aimed at stopping liquor at the border—all for nothing.  He was determined this wouldn’t happen to him again.

When the ax finally fell on the Prohibition Unit, it missed Anslinger completely.  He had already moved on. Three years earlier his bosses at Treasury had reassigned him to the Narcotics Division, a separate compartment within the Prohibition Unit.  The Narcotics Division was supposed to be the enforcement muscle behind the Harrison Narcotics Act, but the agency had been awash in corruption almost from the beginning.  When the son of Commissioner Levi Nutt turned up on the payroll of New York mobster Arnold Rothstein, it finally pinned the scandal meter.  Nutt was relieved of command and Harry Anslinger was given the job of cleaning up the mess.^[20]  But this time Congress felt the situation called for more than a reshuffling of the deck, and they decided to pull narcotics enforcement out of the tainted Prohibition Unit altogether.  With the Porter Act of 1930, they created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a brand new arm of the Treasury Department.  Harry J. Anslinger was given the job of acting Commissioner on July 1, 1930, and everybody but Anslinger thought it was a temporary assignment.  In fact it was a seat he would hang onto with an iron grip for the next thirty years, and like his colleague J. Edgar Hoover over at the FBI, he would routinely confound and outmaneuver his enemies through five presidential administrations.

The impact of this appointment would ripple through history for half a century and more because Harry Anslinger was no ordinary bureaucrat.  He was a law-and-order evangelist—“a cross between William Jennings Bryan and Reverend Jerry Falwell,”