main thrust of the Eisenhower report was to create a robust apparatus to investigate not whether drugs were harmful, but the depths of that harm for society, and to establish an administrative state that would punish violators with harsh sentences. The Eisenhower report reflected the U.S. government’s drive to expand state power and criminalize drug use and abuse, domestically and internationally. As the Eisenhower report was being drafted, the United Nations was actively working on a convention to deal with drug use, abuse, manufacture, trade, and commerce worldwide.3 The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, adopted in 1961, was the international community’s first broad-based, prohibition-centered effort to control the international trade in drugs.4 The stated goal of the convention was to deal with drug abuse and addiction throughout the world. It created the International Narcotics Control Board and developed a list of “schedules” to classify drugs according to relative levels of danger and likelihood of creating an addiction.
Schedule I drugs were the most addictive, hence the most tightly controlled, and the convention placed marijuana in this group. Indeed, the final recommendation of the report drew attention to marijuana, linking narcotic drug abuse with its use and recommending further research. Paragraph 1 of the convention’s article 28, “Control of Cannabis,” requires cannabis to be controlled the same as opium and charges member nations to enact laws to prevent addiction.5 Although the convention states that member nations can allow medical and scientific uses for Schedule I drugs, such as cannabis, restrictions on its manufacture and distribution are substantial. In many ways, the convention sought to outlaw cannabis and at a minimum gave member states the license and motivation to do so.
As the United States mulled over the decision whether to endorse the convention, an ongoing debate on drug policy was taking place, even into the next administration of President John F. Kennedy. On January 15, 1963, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 11076, “Establishing the President’s Advisory Commission on Narcotic and Drug Abuse.” The Advisory Commission took a deep dive into the chemical and physiological impacts of individual drugs, their relationship with addiction, and the public policies that could achieve intended outcomes. The report read something like the La Guardia Report from two decades before. The Advisory Commission noted that the government needed to invest much more in research into questions about drugs, including medical uses and addiction. It stated that drugs that are often grouped together legally are very different in terms of addiction risk and effects on the body. The report also pushed back directly on the report prepared for President Eisenhower, arguing that for low-level drug offenses the social and financial costs of hypercriminalization were too high. The report even went so far as to say that mandatory minimum sentences should be reconsidered. In a period in which the U.S. government and UN seemed to be trying to stoke fear about drugs and impose greater control and criminalization of their use, the Advisory Commission report served as the voice of moderation. Its recommendations, however, would not come to fruition, as the report was delivered to the president just days before his final trip to Dallas.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, was conflicted about drug policy. He was president during some of the most explosive days of the counterculture revolution, and he was its prime target. Antiwar and other protests were occurring across the country, and in front of the White House. The president saw drug use as part of these movements. He also saw soldiers returning from Southeast Asia addicted to a variety of drugs—an additional problem layered atop the Vietnam quagmire.
At the same time, the 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
