Fifty years ago this week, while American boys were nine or 10 thousand miles away from home doing what “Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” then-President Richard Nixon was waging his own war on home soil.
Nixon ignited the drug war during a press conference on June 17, 1971, when he declared drug abuse “public enemy No. 1” and announced the creation of a Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention with a request of $155 million to underwrite the effort.
“America’s public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive,” Nixon said. “I’ve asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority and the funds to fuel this kind of offensive.”
A half century later, that offensive continues to drain taxpayer dollars and overcrowd U.S. prisons with nonviolent criminals, as cannabis remains a Schedule I drug of Nixon’s Controlled Substances Act through federal prohibition.
Nixon went on to create the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973. At the start, the DEA was provided 1,470 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million. By 2019, the agency grew to nearly 5,000 agents with a budget of more than $2 billion, according to history.com.
But as history reveals, Nixon’s war on drugs was more of a political stunt geared toward his presidential approval rating and reelection than it was about public safety and the betterment of society, as Harper’s Magazine writer Dan Baum uncovered in a 2016 article based on a 1994 interview he had with former Nixon Domestic Policy Chief John Ehrlichman—a Watergate co-conspirator.
A top Nixon adviser, Ehrlichman admitted to Baum: “You want to know what this was really all about? 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. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The drug war has not only led to arrests and incarceration, but it has affected entire communities, from education, housing and employment to child welfare, immigration and public benefits. That is why so many lawmakers have recently worked tirelessly to adopt social-equity measures as they push adult-use cannabis legalization through their legislatures.
As the Connecticut Legislature passed adult-use legislation on the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s drug war Thursday, social equity took center stage during a special session in Hartford. Half of the state’s licenses to cultivate and sell cannabis will be reserved for social-equity applicants. In addition, 65% of taxes generated from adult-use cannabis sales will go toward social equity by the fifth year the program is implemented.
As we now know, Nixon’s true public enemy No. 1 was Black people and the like. Unfortunately, that is still the public enemy throughout much of America today.
-Tony Lange, Associate Editor
