1971: Nixon’s War on Drugs
War on Drugs or Race?
At a press conference on June 17, 1971, Nixon declared his war on drugs.
Source: Richard Nixon Foundation
Race uprisings in the late 1960s and ongoing demonstrations against the war in Vietnam left many American voters feeling uncertain and afraid of the future. Richard M. Nixon, the Republican presidential candidate from California, played on these fears by inventing a “war on drugs,” which targeted war demonstrators and African Americans. A shrewd politician, Nixon used his war on drugs as part of his campaign even though the identified “problem” – drugs – and the articulated strategy in response were based on questionable data. In an interview for the book Smoke and mirrors: The war on drugs and the politics of failure, Dan Baum interviewed John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Domestic Affairs Advisor and White House Counsel. During the interview, Ehrlichman revealed the true motivations behind Nixon’s war on drugs strategy:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and [B]lack people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or [B]lack, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and [B]lacks 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 (as cited in Baum, 2016, Par. 2).
John Ehrlichman, former high-ranking aide to President Richard Nixon, shared in a 1944 interview that the drug war was created to target anti-war protesters and Blacks.
Source: UPI file photo
Baum continued,
Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since—Democrat and Republican alike—has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore…one of every eight [B]lack men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. (2016, Par. 4)
Nixon’s strategy paid off. When the sitting President, Lyndon B. Johnson, announced that he was not seeking re-election on March 31, 1968 and when the strongest Democratic candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan on June 5, 1968, Nixon’s path to the White House was secured.
Racial Profiling and the Justice System
While racial profiling in America was not new, America’s relationship between race, drugs, and the justice system would never be the same once Nixon took office (Baum, 2016). The impact of the racist approach to drug laws on African Americans has been devastating. According to the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (2018), the latest incarceration statistics illustrate the disproportionate sentencing of African Americans in the United States, especially men:
Black-to-white racial disparity was also observed among males. Black males ages 18 to 19 were 11.8 times more likely to be imprisoned than white males of the same age…overall, 15% of state prisoners at year-end 2015 had been convicted of a drug offense…in comparison, nearly half (47%) of federal prisoners service time in September 2016…were convicted of a drug offense. (Department of Justice, p. 1)
Since 1968, entire Black neighborhoods have been devastated by the racist drug policies which, essentially, have left households devoid of fathers, uncles, brothers, and sons (Coates, 2015). Much like the dissolution of family that occurred under slavery, the incarceration of Black men continued to keep African American families separated.