In 1912, he was granted a furlough permitting him to enroll at Pennsylvania State College, where he studied in a two-year associate degree program in business and engineering, while working during weekends and vacation periods.

[citation needed] By 1929, Anslinger returned from his international tour to absorb the duties of Levi G. Nutt as assistant commissioner for the Narcotics Division of the Bureau of Prohibition.

[8] The ensuing shake-ups and re-organizations set the stage for Anslinger, perceived as an honest and incorruptible figure, to advance not only in rank but in political stature.

[9] Anslinger also assumed all the duties of Nutt's role as Secretary of the Federal Narcotics Control Board, which was dissolved less than a year later in June 1930.

[11] The illegal trade in alcohol (then still under Prohibition) and illicit drugs was targeted by the Treasury, not primarily as social evils that fell under other government purview, but as losses of untaxed revenue.

[13]| The federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 regulated the labeling of patent medicines that contained "cannabis indica".

Doctor Walter Bromberg pointed out that substance abuse and crime are heavily confounded and that none of a group of 2,216 criminal convictions he had examined was clearly connected to cannabis's influence.

[17] He also ignored a discussion forwarded to him by the American Medical Association, in which 29 of 30 pharmacists and drug industry representatives objected to his proposals to ban cannabis.

[18] As head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger sought, and ultimately received, an increase of reports about smoking of cannabis in 1936 that continued to spread at an accelerated pace in 1937.

[citation needed] The Bureau first prepared a legislative plan to seek a new law from Congress that would place cannabis and its distribution directly under federal control.

[19][20] His view was clear, ideological and judgmental: By the tons it is coming into this country — the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms.

...[21]By using the mass media as his forum, and receiving much support from yellow journalism publisher William Randolph Hearst, Anslinger propelled the anti-cannabis sentiment from state level to a national movement.

He used what he called his "Gore Files" - a collection of quotes from police reports - to graphically depict offenses caused by drug users.

[22] It has since been discovered that Licata murdered his family due to severe mental illness, which had been diagnosed early in his youth, and not because of cannabis use.

[22] Researchers have now proved that Anslinger wrongly attributed 198 of the "Gore Files" stories to cannabis usage, and the remaining "two cases could not be disproved because no records existed concerning the crimes.

[29]According to Johann Hari, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under Anslinger targeted Billie Holiday in response to her 1939 song "Strange Fruit," which criticized racist lynchings.

"[26] However, these allegations have been disputed, with historian Lewis Porter noting that "there was no federal objection to the song “Strange Fruit,” nor was there any campaign to suppress it" and Holiday was instead pursued by Bureau of Narcotics mainly for her history of drug use.

Porter writes that Johann Hari's 2015 book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, is where the allegation that Holiday was targeted for singing "Strange Fruit" originated and that this claim didn't appear anywhere else before that.

"[34] Some critics of Anslinger claim his campaign against cannabis had a hidden agenda rooted in commercial interests not societal welfare.

[35][36] It was not until 1934, and his fourth year in office, that Anslinger considered cannabis to be a serious threat to American society (Wallace Carothers first synthesized nylon on February 28, 1935).

[37][38] Anslinger's efforts were part of the government's broader push to alarm the public about the danger of recreational drugs and to outlaw them.

[40][41] Later in his career, Anslinger was scrutinized for insubordination for refusing to desist from an attempt to halt the ABA/AMA Joint Report on Narcotic Addiction, a publication edited by the sociology Professor Alfred R. Lindesmith of Indiana University.

The new president had a tendency to invigorate the government with more youthful civil servants and, by 1962, Anslinger was 70 years old, the mandatory age for retirement in his position.

In addition, during the previous year, he had witnessed his wife Martha's slow and agonizing death due to heart failure, and had lost some of his drive and ambition.