example, Anslinger claimed that his sledgehammer approach to enforcement had cut the number of addicts in America from a quarter of a million at the turn of the century down to 60,000 or less. His figures were remarkably precise—9458 addicts in New York, 7,172 in Illinois, and so on—and one reporter wanted to know how he could be so sure since there’s no way to take a census of illegal activity.

 “Because within two years every addict will come to the attention of the authorities whether he’s poor or rich,” said Anslinger.  “You mention the name of any addict and you’ll find him in our files... We get reports from the local authorities, we check on our inspection records... any excess purchases immediately shows up in our cards and we find out who the addicts are.”^[43]

Since the Bureau of Narcotics was the government’s official source on drug statistics, Anslinger could say just about anything he wanted and get away with it.^[44]  But the gossamer quality of his numbers is suggested by sudden unexplained shifts that suggest manipulation. White addicts, for example, greatly outnumbered nonwhites in the Bureau’s reports for a generation, then suddenly one day the official majority was black.^[45]  When the Bureau went up to Capitol Hill, the size of the addict problem would often depend on whether Anslinger was looking for a budget increase or a pat on the back.

The first serious assault on Bureau’s information monopoly came from the Mayor of New York.  Fiorello LaGuardia had suspected all along that the Commisioner of Narcotics didn’t know what he was talking about, and in 1939 he assembled a blue-ribbon panel under the auspices of the prestigious New York Academy of Medicine—eminent physicians, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, chemists, sociologists and public health officials, with the full support of the NYPD and the entire medical staff of Riker’s Island prison hospital.  As biographer John McWilliams observed, “Obviously this was more than a half-hearted attempt to score political points in an election year.  Never before or since has such a thorough and extensive study