The real lesson of Anslinger is you take a guy who's hungry for power and feed him, and regardless of actual need you'll get a 10K person department under his c

The real lesson of Anslinger is you take a guy who's hungry for power and feed him, and regardless of actual need you'll get a 10K person department under his control eventually. Its a misallocation thing. NACA (the predecessor of NASA) was 15 years old when Anslinger gained power, and if he was put in control of NACA we'd probably have landed on the moon before Pearl Harbor or some similar ridiculous accomplishment. But no, he was misallocated into some backwater of law enforcement, and thru personal skill he turned it from a backwater into maybe the dominant force in the field. Or more realistic than putting him in charge of future-NASA, if he instead were assigned to the SEC which was formed a couple years too late for him, imagine a world where a super-cop pounds down financial crime. There are bad boomer sports analogies with "the hot hand" and "the playmaker" and honestly I don't think Anslinger cared much about weed at all, as seen by his statements before he gained power; all he cared about was building a 10K person department, which led to the DEA we have today. Big corporate PR oriented mission statements mean nothing to people today, makes you wonder if they'll be vilified for ruining lives decades from now in some weird unanticipated quirk. Anslinger wasn't evil so much as he was tragic. What a waste, both his organizational skills and all the lives ruined as a side effect for decades after. Most discussion about the civilization wide effects of too many people for too few jobs focus on what millions of manual laborers or white collars being non-gainfully employed will do.. but another problem is imagine a world with 1000x as many Anslingers all able to build an empire, yet there are no useful productive empires to build, leading to 1000x the insanity of current drug laws in other fields. Imagine IP allocation, DNS resolution, or software licensing turned into a DEA-like dystopia, simply because there's no real jobs for empire builder-type people.