Nixon Started the War on Drugs. Privately, He Said Pot Was 'Not Particularly Dangerous.'

[Zorro]

Two years after former President Richard M. Nixon launched a war on drugs in 1971, calling substance use the nation’s “public enemy No. 1,” he made a startling admission during a meeting in the Oval Office.

Speaking to a small group of aides and advisers at the White House in March 1973, Nixon said he knew that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.”

Nixon, who had publicly argued that curbing drug use globally warranted an “all-out offensive,” also privately expressed unease about the harsh punishments Americans were facing for marijuana crimes. “Penalties should be commensurate with the crime,” Nixon said during that Oval Office conversation, calling a 30-year sentence in a case he recently had learned about “ridiculous.”

The remarks were captured on the president’s secret recording system amid a set of tapes that were only recently made widely available. A lobbyist for the cannabis industry in Minnesota pored over hours of the tapes and came across the remarks, which leading historians on the Nixon era said they found revelatory.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/us/nixon-marijuana-tapes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Kk4.vOZ8.uwxMnJOW9vPD&smid=url-share

We knew then that Nixon making marijuana a Schedule 1 drug was a big FU to punish college students protesting his escalation of the Viet Nam War.

[hedda_foil]

1. Nixon adviser reveals the racist reason he started the 'war on drugs'

https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-adviser-ehrlichman-anti-left-anti-black-war-on-drugs-2019-7

John Ehrlichman, Nixon's aide on domestic affairs, who would eventually get convicted in the Watergate scandal, had a plan for them. Dan Baum, the author of 1996's "Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure," wrote in Harper's Magazine in 2016 that while researching his book, Ehrlichman gave a reason for the war of drugs that had little to do with protecting Americans from reefer madness.

Chronologically, the civil rights and black liberation movements also dovetailed into Vietnam war era. As Nixon sought to tamp down dissent over a deeply unpopular war, two politically powerful non-establishment forces rose: Blacks and hippies.

Baum wrote that Ehrlichman, following his very public scrutiny and conviction, had "little left to protect" and came clean about a shocking truth. "You want to know what this was really all about?" Ehrlichman asked, referring to the war on drugs.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."

[hedda_foil]

2. Nixon adviser reveals the racist reason he started the 'war on drugs'

https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-adviser-ehrlichman-anti-left-anti-black-war-on-drugs-2019-7

John Ehrlichman, Nixon's aide on domestic affairs, who would eventually get convicted in the Watergate scandal, had a plan for them. Dan Baum, the author of 1996's "Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure," wrote in Harper's Magazine in 2016 that while researching his book, Ehrlichman gave a reason for the war of drugs that had little to do with protecting Americans from reefer madness.

Chronologically, the civil rights and black liberation movements also dovetailed into Vietnam war era. As Nixon sought to tamp down dissent over a deeply unpopular war, two politically powerful non-establishment forces rose: Blacks and hippies.

Baum wrote that Ehrlichman, following his very public scrutiny and conviction, had "little left to protect" and came clean about a shocking truth. "You want to know what this was really all about?" Ehrlichman asked, referring to the war on drugs.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."