For once, Harry Anslinger was satisfied. The bold and often irascible commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, known for his moralistic denunciations of drug use and enthusiastic promises of success in his campaign to eradicate the “demon of narcotics,” must have grown weary of reports that contradicted his most assured public declarations. As confidently as Anslinger predicted certain victory, his own narcotics agents filed incident reports that chronicled a messy battle against illicit narcotic use; indeed, reading between the lines or judging by the heft of the correspondence alone, the campaign against illicit use of narcotics seemed not only uncertain, but much in doubt.

All that changed after the Japanese invasion of eastern China in 1937. Formerly dispirited narcotics agents turned triumphant as they fired off messages to their superiors, recording the sudden and exorbitant rise in the price of illicit narcotics and the “weak” or highly diluted content of drugs sold on the street. One district supervisor sent word in the fall of 1937 of the “high cost of bootleg narcotics,” which he attributed to “strict enforcement of narcotic laws.” Other agents seemed likewise overcome by their own serendipity and success, though in fact this amounted to a gruesome catalog of behavior. The district supervisor in Seattle, Washington, observed that addicts who consumed highly adulterated drugs “subjected their bodies to unusual abuse.” One barbiturate acid commonly “cut” into heroin sold on the black market deteriorated and ultimately destroyed the veins of its user, and those who consumed it in regular amounts resorted to “introduction through the head and particularly the forehead’s small veins.” Narcotics agents in New York sent the Washington office a story of one woman who, “being unable to obtain narcotics, jumped from the fifth floor room in the Lexington apartments … landing 75 feet below on a pile of broken bricks in the alley.” Because the Bureau kept records on all addicts known to them, it was not for poetic reasons that the narcotics agent added that the distraught woman “lived about four hours and died in the Mercy Hospital.” Other heroin users resorted to consuming gallons of paregoric sedative – usually dispensed in small bottles to quiet colicky babies – in order to get the two grains of opium present in each ounce.