Billie Holiday Was Handcuffed to Her Deathbed — The Racist Roots of Cannabis Prohibition

The Man Who Turned a Plant Into a Racial Weapon

Harry J. Anslinger ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for 32 years, and in that time, he didn’t just build America’s drug prohibition framework — he deliberately weaponized it against Black and Latino communities. This wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t hidden. He put it in writing, in official government documents, in testimony before Congress, and in letters to law enforcement agencies across the country.

His own words, from official FBN records:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

That’s not a rumor. That’s not taken out of context. That’s the head of a federal law enforcement agency using taxpayer money to publish explicitly racist propaganda — and Congress let him do it for three decades.

Why “Marihuana” and Not “Cannabis”

One of Anslinger’s most calculated moves was linguistic. The plant had been known in American medicine and agriculture as “cannabis” or “hemp” for centuries. Doctors prescribed cannabis tinctures. Farmers grew hemp by the acre. Everyone knew what cannabis was.

Anslinger deliberately chose the word “marihuana” — a Mexican-Spanish slang term unfamiliar to most white Americans — specifically to exploit racial prejudice. By using a foreign-sounding word, he accomplished two things: he prevented doctors and farmers from immediately recognizing that the bill targeted a plant they used every day, and he linked the substance in the public mind with Mexican immigrants and Black jazz culture.

As researcher Dr. Malik Burnett wrote in a 2014 PBS analysis, Anslinger “relied on racial stereotypes and fears to build public support for criminalization.” The word itself was a weapon — and it worked.

The War on Jazz

Anslinger had a specific obsession with jazz musicians. He maintained a file he called his “Marijuana and Musicians” dossier, and he actively targeted Black performers. His agents surveilled, harassed, and arrested some of the greatest artists in American history:

• Billie Holiday — targeted repeatedly, arrested, stripped of her cabaret card (which meant she couldn’t perform in New York City clubs)
• Charlie Parker — surveilled and harassed by FBN agents
• Louis Armstrong — arrested in 1930 outside a club in Los Angeles, spent nine days in jail
• Thelonious Monk — arrested, lost his cabaret card for years
• Duke Ellington — placed under FBN surveillance

Anslinger believed — or claimed to believe — that cannabis was responsible for jazz itself. That Black musicians used it to create music that would corrupt white audiences. His campaign against jazz was, at its core, a campaign against Black cultural expression.

1959: The Death of Billie Holiday

The most horrifying chapter in Anslinger’s war on jazz musicians is what happened to Billie Holiday in the last weeks of her life.

By 1959, Holiday was dying. She had been admitted to Metropolitan Hospital in New York City on May 31 with liver and heart disease. She was 44 years old, weighed barely 90 pounds, and was confined to her hospital bed.

Anslinger’s agents came for her anyway.

On June 12, 1959, FBN agents entered her hospital room, claimed to find a small amount of heroin (Holiday and her supporters maintained it was planted), and arrested her in her bed. They handcuffed her to the bedrail. They posted an armed guard outside her door. They had her cabaret card revoked — again — even though she was literally dying and would never perform again.

Most cruelly, the arrest gave authorities the pretext to cut off her methadone treatment. Holiday’s condition deteriorated rapidly. She died on July 17, 1959, still technically under arrest, with $0.70 in the bank and $750 strapped to her leg — advance payment for a memoir she’d never finish.

“They came for her when she was dying. Not because she was a danger to anyone. Not because she was selling drugs. Because Harry Anslinger wanted to make an example of a Black woman who wouldn’t stop singing.”

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Anslinger’s racist framework didn’t die with him. The disparities he built into the system persist to this day. According to the ACLU’s 2020 report, Black Americans are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than white Americans — despite using it at roughly equal rates. In some states, that disparity is over 9 to 1.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has published multiple studies documenting how Anslinger’s racialized drug policies created enforcement patterns that persisted long after the explicit racism was removed from official language. The words changed. The targeting didn’t.

Matt’s Take

This is the part of the story they don’t want you to hear.

Cannabis prohibition was never about public health. It was never about protecting communities. It was a racial weapon, built by a racist, funded by corporate money, and enforced by targeting the most vulnerable people in America.

Harry Anslinger wrote — in official government documents — that cannabis made Black people dangerous and their music satanic. He sent armed agents to arrest a dying woman in her hospital bed and handcuff her to the rail. He cut off her medication and watched her die under guard.

And we named drug policy after this man’s framework. We built an entire legal system on his lies. Every person sitting in prison today for a nonviolent cannabis offense is there because of a system that was designed — from day one — to be racist.

You can’t reform something that was built broken on purpose. You have to tear it out by the roots and start over.

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