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    Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs
    Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs
    Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs
    Ebook495 pages7 hours

    Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs

    By Alexandra Chasin

    5/5

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    About this ebook

    Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its establishment in 1930 until his retirement in 1962, Harry J. Anslinger is the United States’ little known first drug czar. Anslinger was a profligate propagandist with a flair for demonizing racial and immigrant groups and perhaps best known for his zealous pursuit of harsh drug penalties and his particular animus for marijuana users. But what made Anslinger who he was, and what cultural trends did he amplify and institutionalize? Having just passed the hundredth anniversary of the Harrison Act—which consolidated prohibitionist drug policy and led to the carceral state we have today—and even as public doubts about the drug war continue to grow, now is the perfect time to evaluate Anslinger’s social, cultural, and political legacy.

    In Assassin of Youth, Alexandra Chasin gives us a lyrical, digressive, funny, and ultimately riveting quasi-biography of Anslinger. Her treatment of the man, his times, and the world that arose around and through him is part cultural history, part kaleidoscopic meditation. Each of the short chapters is anchored in a historical document—the court decision in Webb v. US (1925), a 1935 map of East Harlem, FBN training materials from the 1950s, a personal letter from the Treasury Department in 1985—each of which opens onto Anslinger and his context. From the Pharmacopeia of 1820 to death of Sandra Bland in 2015, from the Pennsylvania Railroad to the last passenger pigeon, and with forays into gangster lives, CIA operatives, and popular detective stories, Chasin covers impressive ground. Assassin of Youth is as riotous and loose a history of drug laws as can be imagined—and yet it culminates in an arresting and precise revision of the emergence of drug prohibition.

    Today, even as marijuana is slowly being legalized, we still have not fully reckoned with the racist and xenophobic foundations of our cultural appetite for the severe punishment of drug offenders. In Assassin of Youth, Chasin shows us the deep, twisted roots of both our love and our hatred for drug prohibition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 30, 2016
    ISBN9780226277028
    Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs

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    • 5/5
      Assassin of Youth by Alexandra Chasin is a wonderfully enlightening experience on many levels: as history, as biography and as creative literature.Well researched, the history aspect of this book is as much about the unethical and inequitable justice system as it pertains to drug policy, particularly marijuana. While the larger skeleton of the book is chronological each individual document, around which each chapter is developed, is analyzed in a much broader scope than simply its place in a chronological story. These connections become ever more important as the work goes on.As a biography it certainly focuses on Harry J. Anslinger as the originator (an originator?) of the racist system put in place and perpetuated still today. It is the interplay between the subject of the history and the subject of the biography where the real reward comes for the reader.The creative manner in which Chasin presents facts and consequences coupled with well-grounded conjecture makes this a pleasure to read. We are asked to creatively read and think about what we have read. If the reader does so it is difficult to see the system under consideration as anything but a racist bureaucratic/legal framework to disenfranchise and criminalize a large portion of the American population.I would highly recommend this to people who like their biographies to be something more than just a regurgitation of a person's life. This will also be an enjoyable read for history buffs. Actually, I would recommend this to everyone who cares at all about how an unequal justice system came about and how we might make the system fair and functional.Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads.

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    Assassin of Youth - Alexandra Chasin

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