As the drug war turns 50, the US is still public enemy number one

For five decades, the US government has wreaked havoc both at home and abroad with its violent ‘war on drugs’.

Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1971, United States President Richard Nixon convened a press conference with a grave message for his fellow citizens: “America’s public enemy number one, in the United States, is drug abuse”. To vanquish the enemy, he declared, it was “necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive”, which would be “worldwide” in nature and would naturally require “more money” from Congress. To be sure, it was fortunate that Nixon included the geographic specification “in the United States” – lest Americans forget the terrible communist menace that was allegedly also imperilling their lives at every moment and that required, inter alia, a multitude of US soldiers to go kill and be killed in Vietnam. As it turned out, part of Nixon’s professed motive for launching the so-called “war on drugs” had to do with none other than the Vietnam War, which had spawned an epidemic of heroin abuse and similar phenomena in the US military. It was hardly rocket science: if you are a poor American dispatched to kill and die for no other reason than imperialism, you are probably more likely to seek a narcotic-fuelled escape from said miserable reality.