Two years after launching the Conflict on Medication, calling substance use “public enemy No. 1,” President Richard Nixon privately acknowledged marijuana was “not significantly harmful.” The admission got here throughout a March 1973 Oval Workplace assembly with aides and was captured on Nixon’s secret recording system.
“Let me say, I do know nothing about marijuana,” Nixon mentioned. “I do know that it isn’t significantly harmful, in different phrases, and many of the youngsters are for legalizing it. However however, it is the improper sign at the moment.” He additionally talked about harsh sentencing in hashish circumstances. “The penalties needs to be commensurate with the crime.” He referred to as a 30-year sentence for marijuana-related offenses “ridiculous.”
These feedback have been revealed in a collection of tapes which have not too long ago change into accessible.
Kurtis Hanna, a Minnesota lobbyist and advocate for drug legalization, found the recordings whereas looking the Nixon Library’s archives. Hanna mentioned he was stunned by Nixon’s stance on hashish, because it contradicted the general public insurance policies he spearheaded. “He was basically saying the precise reverse of what I understood him to imagine,” mentioned Hanna who shared his findings with The New York Instances, which printed them on Saturday.
Nixon’s non-public remarks current a startling distinction to his administration’s public insurance policies which are nonetheless in impact, together with the Managed Substances Act of 1970, which established a classification system for medication. Marijuana was positioned in Schedule I, probably the most restrictive class, alongside heroin and LSD and it stays there to this present day.
Enter The DEA
This classification has contributed to thousands and thousands of marijuana-related arrests, disproportionately impacting Black communities. It has additionally stymied scientific analysis into hashish’s potential medical advantages. To hold out his battle on medication, Nixon created the DEA in 1973. Now, fifty-one years and over $1 trillion {dollars} later, the battle on medication remains to be ineffectual although it has claimed 1000’s of victims.
Learn Additionally: DEA Can Nonetheless Make Hashish Arrests In Authorized Weed States Like Ohio, However It’s Not ‘Our Objective’
Conflict On Medication: John Ehrlichman
In a 2016 Harper’s Journal article, Dan Baum offered extra particulars on drug prohibition and the way it grew to become a nationwide obsession below Nixon.
Baum requested Nixon’s high advisor, John Ehrlichman in 1994 how the U.S. received entangled in a drug prohibition coverage that “yielded a lot distress and so few good outcomes.”
“The Nixon marketing campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White Home after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black individuals,” replied Ehrlichman who died in 1999.
“We knew we could not make it unlawful to be both in opposition to the battle or blacks, however by getting the general public to affiliate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, after which criminalizing each closely, we might disrupt these communities,” Ehrlichman admitted. “We might arrest their leaders, raid their properties, break up their conferences, and vilify them evening after evening on the night information. Did we all know we have been mendacity in regards to the medication? After all, we did.”
On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned as president as a result of impeachment proceedings underway in opposition to him for his involvement within the Watergate affair. On April 22, 1994, Nixon died at 81.
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Picture: Brittanica
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