I was starting a book on the politics of drug enforcement. And in 1994 I got word that John Erlichman was doing minority recruitment at an engineering firm in Atlanta. Well, I’m 60. Erlichman was one of the great villains of American History, a Watergate villain. And he was Richard Nixon’s drug policy advisor. And Richard Nixon was the one who coined the phrase, “war on drugs.”…. And he told me an amazing thing. I started asking him some earnest, wonky policy questions and he waved them away. He said, “Can we cut the B.S.? Can I just tell you what this was all about?” The Nixon campaign in ‘68 and the Nixon White House had two enemies: black people and the anti-war left. He said, and we knew that if we could associate heroin with black people and marijuana with the hippies, we could project the police into those communities, arrest their leaders, break up their meetings and most of all, demonize them night after night on the evening news. And he looked me in the eyes and said, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
If you find yourself doubting the indelible, long-lasting impact that evil can have on history, all one need do is examine the legacy of Richard Nixon. There seems little doubt but that Nixon could have been his generation’s Torquemada…save for the rule of law. He resigned in disgrace after being done in by his megalomania and paranoia…but not before giving us the war on drugs still being fought today. That the war on drugs as envisioned by Nixon had little to do with drugs and everything to do with demonizing those he considered enemies- Blacks and hippies- is hardly surprising. I’ve never heard anyone from the Nixon Administration openly admit it, but I suppose there’s some small amount of comfort to be found in John Ehrlichman’s admission.
The admission and the perspective it provides aside, we’re still fighting Nixon’s pointless, wasteful war more than 40 years on. That the philosophy remains essentially unchanged from its origin is distressing enough; that there are still drug warriors committed to a thoroughly failed approach speaks to government’s inability to learn from its mistakes. The federal government continues pushing its “drugs are bad” agenda despite mountains of evidence pointing to the abject failure of the war on drugs.
With virtually any other issue, almost a half-century of unalloyed failure would have long since seen demands for revisiting and rethinking means and methods used to address a problem. The war on drugs has long been a matter of faith…accepted because it sounded good and decisive even as it lacked evidence to support its efficacy.
It seems a good time to finally reexamine the war on drugs, though it’s a tough call for politicians loathe to look as if they’re soft on drugs and the crime assumed to flow therefrom. The war on drugs is the result of failed policies based on incorrect assumptions that became de facto truth because no one had the courage to call “bullshit” on the rationale behind the brainchild of Nixon’s Machiavellian machinations.
How many lives have been ruined because we’ve refused to address the issue of drugs in America with even a modicum of honesty? It’s difficult to know with certainty, but I feel comfortable in saying that the number isn’t small.
The war on drugs isn’t working; it never has and it never will. It’s time to review and evaluate ways in which we might better and more effectively address drug abuse…unless, of course, we want to devote another half-century to ruining lives and throwing good money after bad.
We deserve better.
