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Cannabis Connection
The day is June 18, 1971. President Richard Nixon is facing blowback for his insistence to destroy millions of lives in the Vietnam War, and America’s most corrupt leader is looking for a scapegoat that would weaken his political enemies, anti-war progressives and racial minorities, and he just found it: marijuana. “America’s public enemy number one is drug abuse,” Nixon announced in the historic speech that launched the country’s War on Drugs, which now celebrates its 50th birthday.
Richard Nixon promised a well-funded, “coordinated offensive,” and that is what he delivered with the subsequent creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Although the promise was to defeat drug abuse, the reality of the War on Drugs is its systematically arrest, imprisonment and punishment of American citizens for consuming often-harmless recreational substances.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that, during the 2010s, more than half of all drug-related arrests were for marijuana possession, and drug repression is carried out with extreme racial prejudice. Black Americans are almost four times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than their white peers, and racial disparities in the War on Drugs have not improved in the last 50 years—they have worsened.
Stigmatize the Users
It is not surprising that the War on Drugs is a racist, oppressive and pointless sinkhole into which the United States government pours astounding amounts of money, because that was the purpose from the very beginning. Former Nixon domestic policy chief famously said as much: “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,” Nixon top aide John Ehrlichman admitted.
A large majority of the issues that people associate with drugs—gangs, mafias, violence, overdoses—are direct consequences of the War on Drugs, not of the drug use itself. Portugal, for instance, chose to decriminalize all drugs, including the hard ones such as heroin and meth, and treat addiction as a public health issue. Instead of throwing addicts in prison for a few years, destroying their future prospects and forcing them into a life of criminality just for wanting to experience an artificial feeling of wellbeing, which has been America’s policy for the past 50 years, Portugal chooses to refer addicts to medical institutions that will address their needs and help them ween off drugs.
Petty users are not a threat to anyone, but drug repression artificially creates a lucrative market for criminal activity, which creates a societal threat. It is not surprising that cartels mainly traffic marijuana; and, incidentally, that they keep losing money and power as more U.S. states legalize it. Most recently, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reiterated proof of this by indicating that marijuana trafficking has dropped 67% since 2016, largely due to legalization in several states, where cannabis is now a harmless substance purchased at a corner store like any groceries, rather than funneling money towards organized crime.
Half-a-century Later, Americans Are Waking Up
It has been precisely 50 years since the process of helping addicts has turned into a belligerent “war” to hurt and destroy anyone perceived to be a drug user. Nixon is reviled today for his innumerable crimes and inhumane policies, yet his legacy is alive and well in an America that still wants to purge addicts out of existence instead of offering them a helping hand. Most Americans would not want another Vietnam War or another Watergate, then why would they want to perpetuate Nixon’s anti-drug policy?
The truth is that Americans do not want that, as evidenced by a flurry of studies released on time for the War on Drugs’ 50th birthday.
“As the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s declaration of a ‘War on Drugs’ approaches, the vast majority of American voters believe the policy has been a failure,” the ACLU concludes in its study. They found that 83% of surveyed people think the War on Drugs failed, while 65% support unilaterally ending it and eliminating criminal penalties for drug possession. Not only are those numbers overwhelming, they are also bipartisan: 82% of Republicans polled on the issue think the War on Drugs was a mistake.
Pew Research Center, in parallel, found that 91% of U.S. adults think marijuana should be at least partially legal and 60% thinking it should be fully legalized. “From 2000 to 2019, the share of Americans saying marijuana should be legal more than doubled,” Pew Research Center concludes, calling the change in tides in public opinion a “steep, long-term rise in support for legalization.”
Even among groups that usually reject marijuana, support for ending the War on Drugs has crossed a threshold of bipartisanship. Pew found that 87% of Republicans and 86% of Americans ages 75 and older support legalization; both of these groups are the least friendly to cannabis reform, yet it is becoming genuinely hard to find anyone who wants to continue the War on Drugs. The only obstacle in the way of ending this half-a-century-long mistake is now the Republican Party itself, regardless of the will of their electorate.
