On the first day of February, the beginning of Black History Month, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) made the brazen decision to honor former President Richard Nixon with a commemorative statement about his efforts to lead the War on Some Drugs.
In a post on X, the agency showed an image of Nixon being handed a “certificate of special honor” in recognition of “the outstanding loyalty and contribution to support narcotic law enforcement.” Needless to say, the post rubbed some people the wrong way, considering the many social crimes that have been perpetrated against Black people in the name of fighting drug use.
The War on Some Drugs has disproportionately targeted and demonized Black people. That fact cannot be argued. But most Americans are still unaware that the Drug War was actually created as a way to silence dissenting Black voices in the early ’70s.
Let’s take a trip through time, dear reader. The year was 1970 and the Nixon regime was in full swing. The only problem: Antiwar protesters and Black activists kept interrupting the peaceful status quo with demonstrations and political movements.
In a 1994 Harpers interview, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy adviser and fellow Watergate co-conspirator, told journalist Dan Baum that the Controlled Substances Act was created in response to political dissent in the country.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: The antiwar left and Black people,” said Ehrlichman. “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. … Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The ploy worked. Too well, in fact. Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) that year, criminalizing the use of marijuana, heroin, LSD, psilocybin and a host of other drugs. Cops started arresting Black people and hippies, and the Peace Movement was cut off at the knees. The Nixon administration said it was looking to battle the dangers of drugs. It said the CSA was implemented to protect public health. Never was it mentioned that the new law was a political shortcut to silence angry constituents that were causing trouble for the administration.
And that one politically-motivated move has fostered a cascade of negative consequences that the U.S. is still struggling to overcome in the 21st century—over half a century later. Not only did it help to incarcerate huge swaths of the population, it has also cost taxpayers trillions in spending, according to the Center For American Progress. The War On Some Drugs even spread to other nations, turning Nixon’s little shortcut into a decades-long problem for the global community.
Talk about short-sightedness.
Nixon really did believe that drugs were dangerous though. One of the most curious aspects of the former president’s personality was his well-known tendency toward paranoia. Nixon secretly recorded everything that happened in the oval office during his presidency (readers will find a cache of racist and homophobic diatribes in the thousands of hours of available recordings). In a number of those recordings, the president claimed that the “drug problem” was a Jewish–Communist conspiracy to destroy the country. So he probably thought the CSA would kill two birds with one stone.
The move was absolutely detrimental to the Black community, but it wasn’t the final blow by a long shot.
Twenty years later, in the 1990s, arrests of Black Americans for violence and property crimes dropped dramatically, but overall incarceration rates were rising. Why, you ask? Because arrests of Black men for drug-related crimes rose during that time.
According to Human Rights Watch, Black inmates currently make up 80 to 90 percent of people sent to state prisons for drug offenses and Black men are sent to prison for drugs at 13 times the rate of white men. The ACLU says that Black people are 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession, even though Black and white men consume cannabis at roughly the same rate in the U.S. Black people are also more likely to be stopped and searched.
The roots of this issue go all the way back to the dawn of the CSA and Nixon’s struggles with the Black community, but it was kicked into high gear in 1994 when President Joe Biden (who was a senator at the time) pushed the so-called Crime Bill through Congress. It was eventually signed by President Bill Clinton. The law provided billions in grants to fund prison expansions.
The Crime Bill used mandatory minimum sentencing disparities between crack and cocaine set in law by the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act to target Black men as grists for the prison mill. There isn’t a huge chemical difference between crack and cocaine, but between 1986 and the signing of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, five grams of crack carried the same sentence as 500 grams of coke.
It’s too hefty a topic to go into here, but crack was essentially the product of cocaine market glut following a CIA scheme to funnel the drug into the U.S. from South America so the profits from illegal cocaine sales could be used to fund a secret proxy war.
With all the cocaine floating around, demand dropped and dealers were losing money. Turning cocaine into crack (baking soda and coke are added to water and heated to produce crystals) allowed the dealers to spread out their product and get more profits.
As a result, highly-addictive crack, at cheaper prices than cocaine, flooded Black communities in the 1980s. By the time the Crime Bill was signed, those communities became the perfect feeding grounds for hungry prisons.
The rest is history—a gut-wrenching history that has yet to be rectified.