Ronald Reagan and the Escalating War on Drugs
Ronald Reagan was a president with a very controversial time in office and an interesting legacy. He did not begin this legacy nor his time in the public spotlight in a similar capacity to other presidents. Reagan was born in a very small Illinois village, went to public school miles away from home, and went to college for economics and sociology. After college, he was originally a radio sports announcer until he moved into his more famous alternate profession, being an actor in Hollywood, after his first screen test in 1937 won him a contract. For the next 20 years, he would appear in 53 films and become president of the Screen Actors Guild twice. From 1947 until 1952, when he would start his career in television, and then once again in 1959 until 1960. He would work as a television host for many years and would run into McCarthyism-esque controversy, which would set him down his road to conservatism, becoming a conservative spokesperson for America’s conservative consciousness while traveling through the nation. Reagan would be elected Governor of California in 1966, would be re-elected in 1970, and then would get the Republican nomination for president in 1980. Reagan would then win the presidency for the next eight years, now engrossed in his new conservative persona.
In order to understand the full scope of Reagan’s administration and the decisions within that administration that ultimately led to the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the other domestic and foreign goals of his administration must be properly laid out. One of the first pieces of legislation that Reagan would put into effect is the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which would reduce individual income tax, reduce the expensing of depreciation on property, and would provide incentives for small businesses and savings. The point of thesse tax reforms was to both stimulate economic growth but also provide more access to the individual on the ability to spend and save their money by operating more independently in the economy away from the federal government, along with them getting trickle-down wealth from those in higher tax brackets and spheres of wealth. This would build and establish an idea of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility over your finances, as well as other facets of American life, throughout the Reagan administration. He would even double down on the previous act with the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which would bring personal and corporate income taxes to a record low at the time. This would again reinforce the ideas of financial and personal independence that the Reagan administration would be pushing for through their economic domestic policy. Speaking of reinforcing ideas of independence in the United States, Reagan would follow in the footsteps of the post-World War II presidents before him by basing a large amount of his foreign policy around the Cold War and Cold War-era proxy wars. While the “War on Drugs” in the 1980s has a specific Cold War proxy war that is vital to the story, on the other hand, Reagan was attempting to make constant strides in the United States’ relations with other countries, and most notably with the Soviet Union. He would meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on multiple occasions in attempts to close the gaps the Cold War had created between them up to that point, and they would even sign a treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles from their arsenals.
During President Reagan’s second term in 1986, he reiterated an anti-drug sentiment shared among politicians and presidents since the time of Nixon, including himself during his first term when he made a similar declaration of a “War on Drugs.” This Anti-Drug stance would then be largely carried on by his wife, Nancy Reagan, with her “Just Say No” campaign until the mid-1980s when the Regan administration would become more active in the fight against drug use once again. President Reagan would give his most well-known speech on the matter beside his wife, Nancy Reagan, in September 1986, the same month that the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 would be introduced in the House of Representatives before being passed that same October. In that September speech, President Reagan claimed that drugs are an epic enemy of the United States and a complete perversion of everything that the nation stands for. He would claim that drugs were poison to children and immediate threats to the nation’s future. In order to wage this war that the Reagan administration had found to be for the soul of America, they passed one of the most controversial pieces of drug legislation in the history of the United States, as studies have shown that it inflated the prison population and disproportionately effected low class and non-White Americans. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 is a bill that sets minimum prison sentences for drug offenders in the United States and the basic criminalized amounts of narcotics for certain narcotics. In this bill, a heavy focus on outlined sentencing would be found on cocaine and its variants, including the popular “crack” variant found in lower-class and black neighborhoods, since the drug was relatively new to the US population and not much legislation focused on it yet. But, the sentencing would be largely inequitable when it comes to the differentiation between cocaine and crack. The bill would outline that having 5 kilograms of cocaine or its various ingredients is punishable with a 1 10-year prison sentence, while having 50 grams of a substance that is a mixture with a cocaine base, which is what crack is, is still getting the same sentence length.
There are a variety of reasons why there is criticism of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, most of them just stemming from how the bill seemingly singled out drug offenders from non-White backgrounds when it came to cocaine sentencing, but in searching for alternatives to what could have prevented this entire situation from the start, it becomes clear that not entering a certain foreign conflict or at least reaching a peaceful resolution in that conflict earlier than historically observable might have actually prevented the crack epidemic in the United States in the first place. That conflict would be the war between the Communist Sandinistas and the anti-Communist Contra in Nicaragua in what is now commonly referred to as the “Contra War” or the Nicaraguan Revolution. The conflict would initially erupt toward the end of the Jimmy Carter administration. When Reagan entered office, he immediately began sending aid to the Contra under the guise of preventing the spread of Communism in South America. However, continued support from Congress in sending the Contra aid in the form of weapons, supplies, and money was unsustainable. So, in an attempt to finance another Cold War proxy war, a CIA operation to finance the Contra without the support of Congress was put in place. The US would trade with a variety of sources and traffick a variety of cargo, with the most famous installation of this strategy being the sale of weapons to Iran, which was a known enemy of the U.S. at the time. When questioned on the weapon sales, President Reagan explained that it was in order to foster new relations with Iran and to have an ally with a high amount of power in the Middle East. This would go on to be referred to as the Iran-Contra Affair. Another important type of trafficking was taking place in order to finance the Contra War as well, that being the trafficking of cocaine into the United States by CIA agents using Contra contacts and other South or Latin American drug networks. This trafficking into the United States would inevitably lead to cocaine becoming a luxury drug and its cheaper form of crack being invented for the consumption of those without expansive incomes. So, the entire escalation of the “War on Drugs” brought on by cocaine being further introduced in the United States in unprecedented amounts and all of the inequitable negative effects it would have on the marginalized populations of the nation could have possibly been prevented. President Reagan could have done several things instead of greenlighting the CIA operation. He could have vetoed it completely to start with, or he could have devised an alternative economic resolution in order to continue financing the Contra, or he could have tried coming to a diplomatic solution between the Sandinistas and the Contra, who would go on to have a ceasefire in 1990 anyway, or he could have accepted Congress’ decision and decided not to pursue the conflict further. Instead, President Reagan did, and cocaine was trafficked into the United States, which would lead to the crack epidemic and require anti-drug legislation; anti-drug legislation that would have numerous negative effects on lower-class citizens since an amount of crack equalling the weight of ten pennies would be charged the same as 5 cantaloupes worth of cocaine.
In retrospect, Reagan would make the same decision today, and his stance would be extremely unpopular. While the current opioid epidemic, as well as reflection on past drug-related legislation, has led to a high amount of reform, the law being discussed is a major milestone that leads to that discussion. However, there are some who would find biases in this law and, based on the information that we now possess on addiction, would say that the law does not take all factors into consideration. However, Reagan would continue to speak from his perspective of law and order in order to successfully punish drug offenders in the United States, and many would not view that the same way that we do now because we do know more. The Reagan administration would take the exact same route, but they would just face more resistance along the road to getting there.
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