This book is neither your granny's account of Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, nor a conventional historical treatment of cannabis and the US war on drugs. Assassin of Youth, the newest nonfiction offering from Alexandra Chasin, is weirdly exhilarating, both playful and mordant, and, well, appropriately trippy. The author of both fiction and nonfiction, including Brief (2013) and Selling Out : The Lesbian and Gay Movement Goes to Market (2000), Chasin has made a career out of investigating disciplinary and disciplined knowledge, and this book is no exception. Using as a literary device the kaleidoscope – “an optical device that continuously juxtaposes elements in a mirrored chamber, generating constantly changing patterns according to the twist of the viewer” (3) – Chasin tackles all the platitudes and personages, events and effects of Harry J. Anslinger's life cycle. An associate professor of literary studies at the New School, Chasin offers prose that is “squirrelly, spirally, circular, and in places downright rococo – as a pushback against linear argumentation” (11).
The book houses forty-eight chapters, each of which revolves around a primary source, or series thereof. In blending genre, crossing disciplines, and bending the rules, the book moves forward chronologically, yes, but remains complicated by synchronic and achronologic techniques. (In addition to the terms above, this reader also had to refresh on concepts such as anachrony, metonymy, rectilinearity, and so on.) The story moves backwards and forwards, and sideways, and witnesses the introduction of various real and unreal characters at any given time, including the author and Martha, the last passenger pigeon. Assassin of Youth’s formatting, with its spliced images, overhanging quotations, interspersed diagrams and tables, challenges the reader, and defies lethargy. With all its extranarrative attributes and poetic licenses, the book travels in several directions at any one time. Chapter 21, for example, centres on an excerpt of Anslinger's travel diary during his time in France in 1919; as he seeks to recount the unimaginable destruction in Europe, he misspells “describe” as “descrive” (115). For the rest of the text, Chasin plays with this idea and deliberately misspells the word herself. Assassin of Youth is stimuli for the senses, in short, demanding the reader's all-out attention.
To her credit, Chasin does not disparage Anslinger in a reflexive manner. That would be too facile. Chasin is civil, but uncompromising. In certain instances, she rightfully annihilates him, as xenophobic, as a pawn of the pharmaceutical lobby, and woefully unprepared for and uneducated to administer the Bureau of Narcotics. In other instances, with yarns about his dreadful eyesight, employment with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and experiences overseas, “Harry” – as Chasin is wont to call him – is disassembled and reconstituted. He is torn apart and built back up again. The consequence is that the reader begins to distinguish the shimmering contours of an unabridged being, in all its eccentricity and humanity, and free of well-worn tropes and bromides associated with the war on drugs. Some monographs defy simple summarization. On occasion, this suggests that the author lacks direction, has been blown off course, or lacked a proper set of seafaring maps from the outset. Other times, however, the précis is challenging because the work is so rare, rich, and real that the only work it bears a resemblance to is itself. It's demanding to describe this imaginative and intense book appropriately, so it's best just to read it, even if one walks away shaking the head.
