decade he had succeeded in fixing the idea in the public mind that narcotics and communism were simply two faces of the same monster.^[49] 

The payoff was immediate.  Congress opened the vaults and the Bureau’s budget was doubled over the next five years.^[50]  But since drug use continued unabated—and was said to be flowering in the black and Puerto Rican ghettos of the North—it was clear that cash alone wouldn’t be enough.^[51]  Anslinger had been lobbying for tougher laws all along, and now he added to the mix an explosive new charge, this time against the judicial system itself. Here again, there was no study, no survey, no evidence other than newspaper clippings and Anslinger’s gut-level feelings, but he convinced himself—and would shortly convince Congress—that the problem could be laid at the feet of lenient judges.^[52]

As it happened, one of Anslinger’s allies, Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs, was in need of a crusade at that moment. The Louisiana State House was in the grip of Governor Earl Long, brother of “Kingfish” Huey Long, but in 1951 Earl was taking some serious hits in a corruption scandal and he was starting to look vulnerable.  Boggs saw that if he could position himself as a law-and-order reformer, he might be able to take the governor’s mansion in the next race. When he discovered there was a narcotics problem in New Orleans, he thought he’d found the key. In April of 1951, he  conducted three days of hearings, and after a catalog of horror stories from Commissioner Anslinger about soft laws and liberal judges, Boggs rammed through the most stringent narcotics penalties in history.  This time Congress took judicial discretion out of the hands of judges and handed it to the prosecutors by making the sentences mandatory. The minimum now was two years regardless of the circumstances.  Second offenders got at least five years without probation, and the three-time losers, not less than twenty.^[53] 

Unfortunately the new law had no noticeable impact on the narcotics trade, but Harry Anslinger was a policeman first and last, and he had absolutely no faith in any approach other than