Reefer Madness: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Pot Prohibition, Pt. II
How racism, pseudoscience and power-hungry politicians fueled America’s modern War on Drugs.
Ok, here’s the deal. It’s 1968. MLK and RFK are dead. Eddie Adams is traipsing about Ho Chi Minh City, camera in hand. Smith and Carlos decide to shake up an awards ceremony in Mexico City. There are a lot of tie-dyed shirts and black men in berets. For many, it feels like everyone — including Don Draper — is smoking a lot of weed and debating whether or not they should move to LA.
The counterculture seems to be taking control, and no one’s more upset about it than Richard Nixon.
Naughty Mr. Nixon.
“You 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 the 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.”
— John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Richard Nixon
You see, 1968-era Nixon had problems. People weren’t just saying he wasn’t telegenic enough to be President. They were also growing concerned he wasn’t racist enough either. Fortunately for them, Nixon was never one to steer clear of a morally-compromising situation. Nixon figured he (a Republican) could get political support from white voters in the South (traditionally Democrats) if he appealed to their racism against African Americans (literally just asking for basic human rights). Nixon piggybacked on Anslinger’s efforts to have the “Silent Majority” associate marijuana with racial minorities and the counterculture, and spent much of his campaign asserting that their use of drugs like marijuana was threatening America’s “social climate of order and justice”. These (very poorly) coded racial implications led a Washington Post pollster to invent a new term to describe Nixon’s rhetorical approach. Hence, dog-whistle politics.
Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ ended up winning him the 1968 election. He spent much of his first term oscillating between asking Congress to continue funding our involvement in Vietnam and hitting them up for money for “a new, all-out offensive” aimed at “fighting and defeating America’s public enemy number one”… drugs.
And despite no compelling evidence that drug use was severely impacting America’s public health or safety, Congress ponied up for it.
First up was the Controlled Substances Act, a directive which established a regulatory system in which all drugs with the potential to be abused were sorted into five ‘schedules’ (evaluated according to ‘dependency potential’ vs. ‘medical benefits’). And rather than doing something silly like having the FDA (or really, anyone in the medical or scientific community) classify these substances, Congress did the sorting themselves.
Marijuana — together with opium, heroin, LSD, and peyote — got Schedule 1, the most dangerous listing. This essentially barred (and continues to block) any scientific study of the plant. For context… cocaine, meth, fentanyl, and oxycodone are all Schedule 2. And for some weird reason that probably had nothing to do with big-money interests — drugs like alcohol and nicotine weren’t even included in this scheduling directive.
If at first you don’t succeed — lie, lie again.
By 1972, The War on Drugs was going very well. Nixon had a new piece of popular legislation (the CSA), a new federal agency (the DEA), a new war (taking some heat off of the disaster that was Vietnam), and um, a new energy around the vilification of racial minorities (Nixon was recorded using the n-word, suggesting black Americans “lived like dogs” and claiming African leaders were “just out of the trees”).*
You see, as Nixon was preparing for battle, he realized he was in desperate need of a “goddamned strong statement on marijuana… one that tears the ass out of [antiwar left and black people]”. So in 1970 he convenes a committee of politicians, doctors, college presidents and attorneys to study cannabis and its impact on America’s health and safety. He presumed the “The National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse” would soon become a state-sanctioned vehicle for pumping out anti-cannabis propaganda. And it really should have been—Nixon appointed 9 of the committee’s 13 members and installed his close friend Raymond Shafer (the conservative Republican governor of Pennsylvania) as its chair.
What happened? Let’s just say no one can claim Shafer acted loyal to a man when he shouldn’t have. After two years of well-funded studies, the Shafer Commission presented Nixon with their findings; an angstily-titled report called “Marihuana, A Signal of Misunderstanding”. The report concluded that cannabis was “not physically addictive, a gateway drug or proven harmful in any physical or physiological way” and cannabis users did not cause widespread danger to society. In fact, they noted that marijuana consumption only seemed to make its users “timid, drowsy and passive”. The commission concluded that marijuana was only as much of a public health threat as alcohol and recommended decriminalizing it.
Nixon was apoplectic. In a stunning display of what would become his incredibly consistent M.O., the President a) first tried to coerce Shafer into recanting, b) followed up by threatening Shafer’s career and c) finally completed his tour de felony by burying the report and lying to the public about the veracity of its findings.
Watergate happens soon after. But the War on Drugs continued on—if with slightly less enthusiastic generals. Gerald Ford focused on destroying the US’s drug supply by ramping up Latin American demand for American drug-war dollars. Jimmy Carter tried — but failed — to decriminalize marijuana (even going on record stating that “penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself… nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use”).
A tale of two Reagans.
Soon Carter’s out, and with him go dreams of a humane, well-reasoned approach to U.S drug policy.
In 1980, Republican Ronald “marijuana is probably the most dangerous drug in the United States today” Reagan rides into the White House (in large part thanks to a revival of Nixon’s Southern Strategy). One of the first big things his administration does is get the “Anti-Drug Abuse Act” passed, which gives them $1.7 billion to escalate Nixon’s fight. Reagan’s strategy was relatively simple; jail a generation of black & brown men, destabilize an entire region of the world and deploy cute acronyms into American classrooms. His most effective weapon in the fight? Introducing “zero-tolerance” into America’s criminal sentencing parlance. The Reagan years saw the establishment of 28 new mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses (ed note: there had only been 55 mandatory minimums in the entire legal system before he took office).
The devastating impact of Reagan’s anti-drug crusade (which George H.W. Bush adopted with a similar—if less “successful”—enthusiasm) cannot be overstated. In 1980, 50,000 people were behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses. In 1997? The number was 400,000. American anti-drug operations extended into almost every Latin American country, sparking conflicts that cost millions of lives and livelihoods. First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” catchphrase and corresponding campaigns whipped millions into hysterics, which led to an almost spiritual anti-drug fervor amongst the American public. The Reagans’ crusade was only amplified by local government officials like Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates — who doubled-down on his opinion that “casual drug users should be taken out and shot” right before before founding D.A.R.E (a program tasked with educating the entire country’s schoolchildren about drug use).
While Bill Clinton may not have inhaled…
He did make the 1994 Crime Bill happen. Don’t let the drawl fool you — Bill’s bill may have had a few provisions for drug abuse prevention efforts, but it mostly served as vehicle for the three strikes clause, dramatic increases in federal prison funding, and the development of grant programs that would drastically scale and militarize local police presences. The results? Would take a dissertation. Some quick Clinton-era weed-related stats…
- In 1991, there were approximately 327,000 annual marijuana arrests in the US. When Clinton left office, there were close to 750,000.
- City-level stats are even more mind-boggling. In 1991, New York City made 800 marijuana arrests. In 2010, it made 60,000.
The racial biases evidenced in the arrest (and later, convictions and imprisonment) data is staggering. So we’re on the same page, all evidence shows virtually identical rates of cannabis consumption across racial groups. However in New York and D.C, a black person is ~4x more likely than a white person to get arrested for cannabis. In Alabama, it’s nearly 5x. In Pennsylvania, it’s around 8x.
And despite growing momentum around legalization, the injustice is nowhere close to being over. Studies estimate that 600,000 people are still arrested for marijuana possession each year (costing taxpayers a cool billion dollars or so). In at least 21 states, these numbers have actually gone up over the past five years.
Part III of our our “Reefer Madness” series is coming soon. Missed part I? Check it out here.
* To be fair, “Tricky Dick” was an equal opportunity bigot. When he wasn’t calling Jews ‘born spies’ with “very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personalities”… making it impossible for him to “trust the bastards”, he was trying to revive the House Committee on Un-American Activities to “go after all these Jews”. Mexicans were “dishonest thieves”. He didn’t think “a woman should be in any government job whatever… mainly because they are erratic. And emotional”. He chastised Henry Kissinger for trying to halt civilian bombing in Vietnam, claiming Kissinger was “so goddamned concerned about civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.” Indira Gandhi was a “bitch” and an “old witch”. He even went after the Italians (“don’t have their heads screwed on right”) and the Irish (“virtually every Irish I know gets mean when drinks”).
