Marijuana. John Hudak
Johnson administration offered some rays of hope for those seeking a change in course in America’s drug policy. Harry Anslinger had retired as head of the Bureau of Narcotics in 1962 and completed a short stint on the UN’s narcotics board until 1964, after which time the U.S. government no longer sought Anslinger’s counsel on drug policy. The Advisory Commission report recommended reforming the nation’s drug policy bureaucracy—a direct challenge to the Bureau of Narcotics. This reform proposal would move part of the drug policy responsibility from the exclusive control of law enforcement agencies in Justice and Treasury to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).6 That move was formalized by the passage of the Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965, which expanded the powers of the secretary of HEW to make determinations about the classifications of drugs.7 In early 1966 HEW established the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control to administer this expanded authority, which was housed in the Food and Drug Administration.8
President Johnson not only saw drug use and its connection to crime as a serious problem for the nation but also a public health crisis, often distinguishing between users and dealers. In his 1966 Special Message to Congress on Crime and Law Enforcement, Johnson noted a recent rise in the seizure of drugs, including marijuana. However, in a statement that at the time was bold for an American president, Johnson asserted, “Our continued insistence on treating drug addicts, once apprehended, as criminals, is neither humane nor effective. It has neither curtailed addiction nor prevented crime.” A comprehensive new drug treatment plan, based on this sentiment, would have been seismic in nature, pushing back against the tsunami of laws and policies seeking to criminalize drug use. However, given the president’s standing and the rapidly deteriorating situation in Vietnam, Johnson was unable to reform drug laws before withdrawing from reelection. He was succeeded by Richard Nixon. Any hope of reforming America’s drug laws—treating users as patients rather than prisoners and distinguishing marijuana from highly habit-forming narcotics—were all dashed by the 1968 election. If Harry Anslinger was a foot soldier in the fight against drugs, Richard Nixon was America’s first drug warrior.
4
Richard Nixon Fires the Opening Shots in the War on Drugs
While Lyndon Johnson at times acknowledged treating drug use and addiction as a public health problem, Richard Nixon believed drugs to be a criminal element and a scourge on society—their use to be punished; their existence to be stamped out.
President Nixon was a man riddled with fear and paranoia who often vented his frustration toward groups based on their “otherness”—blacks, Jews, foreigners, women, Democrats, Congress, even his own staff, and whomever else he perceived as a threat. Drugs and drug users were one such threat, as was the counterculture movement, which Nixon despised. Nixon inherited from Johnson a war and a “drug-fueled” hippie movement, and he sought to end both. Within those efforts is an irony. The president who ultimately extracted the United States from one of its most protracted wars would launch the nation on its longest, most enduring conflict: the War on Drugs.
Richard Nixon often framed the War on Drugs as a policy-driven effort to root out drug abuse from American society. The reality was much more complex. No doubt Nixon saw drugs as a problem and a threat. His own battles with alcoholism perhaps offered him familiarity with the ills of substance abuse. However, the War on Drugs also fit into Nixon’s broader political strategy. Nixon’s well-known Southern strategy sought to vilify out-groups in society, particularly racial minorities and members of the counterculture. It capitalized on white Americans’ fears of a changing society and sought to shift blame for these changes onto school integration, crime, drug use, urban unrest, and the quest for civil rights. In fact, Nixon’s White House counsel, John Ehrlichman, has been quoted as explicitly stating that Nixon’s drug policies were racially motivated.1
These political efforts were a pushback against Johnson administration policies and the social upheaval of the 1960s. Drug use both created fears and gave Nixon fuel to further stoke those fears. It also intertwined with long-term government rhetoric that drug use, especially marijuana use, had been introduced to the United States by Asian and Mexican immigrants and was predominantly among black populations. That targeting of use and scapegoating allowed Nixon to paint an effective “us versus them” scenario that could be extended to electoral arenas, particularly by peddling the worry that those groups could infect innocents with such drugs. The War on Drugs was as much about getting Richard Nixon reelected in 1972 as it was about eliminating drugs from American society. Of course, no armistice was signed at the start of Nixon’s second term, nor as he exited the presidency in disgrace two and a half years later.
War Planning and Strategy
Even before President Nixon officially declared a war on drugs, his drug policy shifted in dramatic ways, in part rhetorical and in part statutory. In his first year in office, Nixon discussed combatting drug use on numerous occasions—in speeches, in messages to Congress, and through executive actions. On July 14, 1969, Nixon told Congress that drug abuse was “a serious national threat to the personal health and safety of millions of Americans.”2 With the commonplace rhetoric of drug policy, he went on to put the consequences into a horrifying yet digestible context for Congress and the public: “Street robberies, prostitution, even enticing of others into addiction to drugs—an addict will reduce himself to any offense, any degradation in order to acquire the drugs he craves.”3 Nixon’s address included a ten-point plan that focused largely on empowering law enforcement and expanding punishment. Only one plank of the plan addressed rehabilitation of addicts, but with the explicit caveat that “this sickness cannot excuse the crimes they commit.”4
Nixon’s actions went beyond rhetoric. The first shot in what would become Nixon’s new War on Drugs began in response to a court case. On May 19, 1969—less than four months into the Nixon presidency—the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Leary v. United States.5 The case was significant for the future of drug policy and likely had a substantial effect on what would become Nixonian activism on the issue. Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor, was arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border for possessing marijuana and charged with violating the Marijuana Tax Act. He sued, claiming that the law violated his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as it required him to admit possessing an illegal substance because he had an obligation to pay taxes on it under the act. Ultimately the Supreme Court agreed and ruled as unconstitutional the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937—one of the country’s most significant pieces of marijuana legislation.
Just a few months later, in September 1969, Nixon and John Ingersoll, the head of the new Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the successor to the Bureau of Narcotics), authorized Operation Intercept, a multiday effort to shutter the U.S.-Mexico border to search vehicles for illegal drugs. The expensive operation yielded relatively little in terms of seizures of contraband, led to an aggressive counteroperation by the Mexican government, and was widely considered a failure—except within the White House.6 On October 23, 1969, President Nixon organized the Bipartisan Leadership Meeting on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and after delivering opening remarks, he introduced Ingersoll and offered him an opportunity to heap praise upon Operation Intercept. Nixon explained, “Operation Intercept was very, very successful. While it was in effect, and even to this day, the flow of narcotics and marihuana from Mexico into this country was substantially curtailed. Marihuana is still in short supply in the United States, and in most places where it is available, at least the Mexican form, the prices have doubled and in some cases tripled.”7 Contemporary and historical accounts of Operation Intercept suggest that Nixon was divorced from reality in making these comments.8
Arming General Nixon and His Conscripts
Besides his rhetorical efforts to put the drug problem into his preferred context and his cheerleading for the administration’s drug control efforts, the president also sought legislative paths toward expanded federal power to control drugs. In 1970 Nixon took up the cause of bringing the United States into line with the UN’s Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Working with Congress, the president signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, more commonly known as the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).9
This law formalized the drug scheduling construct prescribed in the Single Convention. Under CSA, there would be five drug schedules ranging from Schedule I to Schedule