Harry J. Anslinger

Founding Commissioner of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which he led from 1930 until 1962. Anslinger is the individual most closely associated with the construction of the twentieth-century prohibitionist regime, both domestically — through the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act and the moral panic campaigns that preceded it — and internationally, through sustained US pressure on Mexico and Latin American governments to adopt punitive drug policies.

His most consequential intervention in Mexican drug history was the sustained 1938–1940 pressure campaign that forced President Cárdenas to remove Salazar Viniegra and suspend the state morphine dispensary program within four months of its launch, threatening narcotic-supply embargoes to compel compliance. Pérez Ricart’s archival work complicates the picture of Anslinger as omnipotent: the FBN often lacked a coherent Mexico policy and worked through improvisation as much as design, but its pressure was decisive at key inflection points.