Nixon's War on Drugs

More than 30 years after cannabis prohibition officially began, President Nixon became much more aggressive in his anti-drug policies than any prior administration had been. To Nixon the focus on drugs was a way of distracting from controversial issues like the Vietnam war and controlling minority counter-culture groups that he felt were a threat to traditional American values. One of Nixon’s top aides, H. R. Haldeman, is quoted as saying ‘[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes that without appearing to.’ Nixon was also infamous for his anti-semitic paranoia, sometimes voicing his belief that the Jews were behind the effort to legalize cannabis. As the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam waged on, Nixon declared protestors were ‘all on drugs’ and moved to shift the focus from his questionable policies to their questionable morals. Anyone who didn’t fall in line was branded weak on drugs and considered to be contributing to the scourge of drugs in America.

In May of 1969 famous psychedelic activist Timothy Leary appeared before the Supreme Court, and in a landmark decision the court ruled the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act (the law that officially started cannabis prohibition) was unconstitutional because it violated a persons 5th amendment right against self-incrimination. Less than six months after the law on which prohibition was predicated was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, on September 21, Operation Intercept began. For three weeks men patrolling the Mexican border stopped and searched every car crossing into the United States—resulting in little more than headaches and an economic downturn. Ostensibly the operation was carried out to stem the flow of Mexican marijuana, making it more difficult to obtain. U.S. Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst stated that the goal was ‘to drive the price [of marijuana] so high it will be unavailable to students in colleges and high schools’ where cannabis use was becoming more and more popular. Later though, G. Gordon Libby—another Nixon advisor—wrote that the real reason for Operation Intercept was a ‘practice in extortion’ to get the Mexican government to tow the line and crack down on drug trafficking. Nixon pushed for support of his anti-drug platform not just in the United States, but in countries throughout the Western world.

A year later congress ratified the Controlled Substances Act, which (as most of us know) classified cannabis as a Schedule I drug, meaning that the government considered it to be (at least on paper) a dangerous and addictive substance with no medical benefits. (Even cocaine was classified as Schedule II !) The new law expanded law enforcement rights and cut into American citizens’ civil liberties—perhaps the most well-known of these new policies was the authorization of no-knock raids. But cannabis’s Schedule I status was meant to be temporary, pending more research. Reluctantly, Nixon appointed the Shafer Commission (hand-picking most of its members to assure they shared the same bias) to look into marijuana use and make policy recommendations. As with the LaGuardia Report, the experts concluded that cannabis was nowhere near as harmful as the propaganda campaign asserted and society would benefit from a more lax stance—i.e. Marijuana is not particularly dangerous and should be decriminalized, if not legalized outright. Regardless of the Shafer Report’s conclusion that ‘The most notable statement that can be made about the vast majority of marijuana users […] is that they are indistinguishable from their non-marijuana using peers’, Nixon was devoted to scapegoating herb and those who used it. As the Shafer Report put it, cannabis wasn’t so much dangerous to one’s health as ‘a symbol of the rejection of cherished values,’ and therefore a threat to the wholesome, conservative values of the time. Nixon went looking for pop icons to help speak to America’s youth. Elvis Presley offered his support and became Nixon’s most famous spokesperson. (Somewhat ironically, turns out, because of his no famous addiction to prescription medications.)

On June 17, 1971 President Nixon declared at a press conference that ‘America’s public enemy number one is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.’ With that the War on Drugs had officially begun and within the next few years the number of people arrested for marijuana-relate offenses was higher than that of all violent crimes combined.