opponents—scientists, jurists, academics—never grasped the fact that the Commissioner was not playing by the rules.  They were on a quest for truth and justice.  Harry Anslinger was on a mission from God.  If he had to cut a few throats to accomplish the Lord’s work, so be it. He managed to get his adversaries fighting among themselves, and by the time the LaGuardia report was finally released in 1945, the profusion of charges and counter-charges had taken the edge off the issue and the astounding end product was virtually ignored by the press.

The United States behaves best in a crisis. For a nation so vast and diverse there is nothing to unify the citizens like the call to arms.  In the face of an appropriately monstrous foe, the races, creeds, and colors who are normally at each other’s throats somehow manage to weld themselves into a single-minded all-powerful engine of war.  Peace, therefore, brings a curious sense of loss as people turn back to their private lives.  The Second World War, like the First, was followed by a period of disillusionment and suspicion, and when China fell to the Communists in 1949, the U.S. went through a convulsion of fear and recrimination that made the Red Scare of the 1920s look civilized.

Harry Anslinger, once again, was a victim of his own success.  The legions of addicted GIs he predicted after the war had failed to materialize, and the country was more interested in demobilization than narcotics. “Our funds are so low,” wrote Anslinger, “that we couldn’t even send an agent across the border from El Paso unless he walks...”^[48]  He needed some way to reinvigorate his supporters, and the anti-communist firestorm that would come to be known as the McCarthy era meshed perfectly with Anslinger’s own hatred of the Bolsheviks.  Anslinger declared that the real menace to America was not communist troops but communist opium.  In a precise echo of the post-war propaganda of the 1920s, he warned that the Red conspiracy was out to destroy the West, not with force, but with needles.  By the end of the