Nixon Started the War on Drugs. Privately, He Said Pot Was ‘Not Particularly Dangerous.’
The New York Times
President Richard Nixon’s remarks were captured on his secret White House recording system but had eluded the notice of leading Nixon era historians until now.
Two years after former President Richard M. Nixon launched a war on drugs in 1971, calling substance use the nation’s “public enemy No. 1,” he made a startling admission during a meeting in the Oval Office.
Speaking to a small group of aides and advisers at the White House in March 1973, Nixon said he knew that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.”
Nixon, who had publicly argued that curbing drug use globally warranted an “all-out offensive,” also privately expressed unease about the harsh punishments Americans were facing for marijuana crimes. “Penalties should be commensurate with the crime,” Nixon said during that Oval Office conversation, calling a 30-year sentence in a case he recently had learned about “ridiculous.”
The remarks were captured on the president’s secret recording system amid a set of tapes that were only recently made widely available. A lobbyist for the cannabis industry in Minnesota pored over hours of the tapes and came across the remarks, which leading historians on the Nixon era said they found revelatory.
The comments, on scratchy, sometimes hard-to-hear recordings, provide a surprising glimpse into the thinking of the president who implemented the federal government’s drug classification system and decided that marijuana belonged in a category of substances deemed most prone to abuse and of no proven medical value. Over five decades, that designation has led to millions of arrests, which disproportionately affected Black people and hobbled efforts to rigorously study the therapeutic potential of cannabis.
