The War on Drugs: A War of Racism and Mass Incarceration

From a dimly lit room, on the 17th June 1971, then-President Richard Nixon stepped towards a microphone and declared “war” on “public enemy number one”. But this announcement wasn’t about a country or a group of people. Nixon had just declared a war on drugs.

This was a monumental moment in US political history. From then on, public policy on drug use and abuse shifted: from a focus on demand reduction and rehabilitation, towards a punitive approach to anyone caught in possession of illicit substances.

But what was the purpose of a militaristic declaration of war? The common perception involves a logical and empirical rationale: if drugs deteriorate well-being and health, the reason for such an aggressive shift in public policy must concern public health. However, there were also more potent causes at play: the political and social agendas of the Republican party during this time. Whilst it was Nixon who proposed the war on drugs, his Republican compatriots Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush have certainly accelerated the consequences of a ‘war’ on drugs. This supposed public health and safety policy has unfortunately led to mass incarceration and racism against African Americans in the United States

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John Ehrlichman

The former Counsel and Assistant for Domestic Affairs under President Nixon, John Ehrlichman, argued that the Nixon administration “knew [they] couldn’t make it illegal to be against the war or the blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then by criminalising both heavily, [they] could disrupt those communities”.

This can be attributed to the Republican Party’s ‘Southern Strategy’, which saw the war on drugs serve as a political weapon for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. The ‘Southern Strategy’ had been used as a tool for the Republican Party since 1964, strongly appealing to racial beliefs held by a democratic, conservative, white demographic to re-align them and consequently win votes. Indeed, drugs, throughout the Reagan and Bush presidencies, became heavily associated with the ‘hippie’ counterculture, appealing to the antipathy amongst Southern conservatives to hippies and urbanites. Thus throughout this period, the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Presidencies traded in dog whistles that associated drug use with African Americans in an attempt to win popularity and votes.

Source: Drug Policy Alliance

Yet, whilst Nixon’s racism was well documented, perhaps accusing him of racism on the declaration of a war on drugs is still an oversimplification. His strong use of language in his 1971 speech, clearly framing emerging public policy as an “all-out offensive” focused on meting punishment and “defeat[ing]” the supposed epidemic of “drug abuse”, suggests that there are public health concerns at play. This is backed up by federal antidrug spending during Nixon’s presidency from 1969-1974, where demand reduction and rehabilitation (focusing on treatment and prevention) had consistently greater expenditure as opposed to supply reduction (law enforcement and interdiction). Rather, it was during the Reagan presidency that anti-drug spending became far more focused on supply reduction, leading to “the modern, punitive drug war we know today”.

Additionally, during his time as president, there is tangible evidence that suggests there was a degree of addiction among his soldiers fighting in Vietnam, leading to more drug use throughout the war. There was an increase in marijuana use that followed an influx of heroin use during 1970, to which “1/5 of the enlisted troops were addicted at some time during their tour”. Indeed, an archive of a New York Times article from 1971 reveals that officials in Vietnam were aware of a growing market for ‘scag’ (heroin), who attempted to “curtail the easy flow of heroin to the soldiers”. The apparent prevalence of drugs among veterans of the Vietnam war morphed into a larger moral panic about drug use and abuse, as the war brought the problems with drug abuse – a symptom of the emotional and psychological costs of war – into the public consciousness.

This, in turn, played a huge role in the advent of the war on drugs; the increase in public awareness proportionately led to higher amounts of overdosage both inside and outside of the US. Indeed, the attitude of the United States military to drug abuse by large numbers of its soldiers perhaps influenced the larger political treatment of the problem. As Alvin M. Shuster in the New York Times noted, the “United States command” often viewed those addicted to heroin as “weak,” abrogating it of “responsibility” to “cure [these] men” and thus placing “heavier emphasis on punishment”. The militaristic language Nixon used to characterise the ‘War on Drugs’ thus can be viewed as an echo of the military’s own approach to the heroin epidemic within its own ranks. Therefore, Nixon’s decision to declare ‘war’ on drugs, despite being principally informed by naive public health ambitions, was indeed shaped by the perception of a wide-scale drug epidemic sparked by the Vietnam War, and the military’s own treatment of addicts within its ranks.

A Turn for the Worse

The 1981 election of Ronald Reagan would prove disastrous for the war on drugs, whose eventual consequences were manifestly racist. Ronald Reagan is the president who was notorious for the significant ‘militarisation’ of the war on drugs, strongly encouraging the army to get involved in drug law enforcement. Despite the First Lady Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign, which aimed to educate young children about drugs, the beginning of Reagan’s presidency saw 50 000 people incarcerated for non-violent drug-related offences in 1980, compounding to 400 000 by the end of the George H. W. Bush presidency. It was also during this period that federal interest “grew rapidly” with the creation “of a new set of prosecutor-led units (the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force program)”, and in doing so, made the punitive shift increasingly obvious. This shift was concerning, as it made the problem institutionally cyclical. Drug users would take drugs, receive little to no rehabilitation, get out of jail and take drugs again. Whilst this is an oversimplification of the issue, it is still a broad embodiment of the experiences of many drug users during Reagan’s presidency.

On a similar note, the drug war under Bush is representative of the exponential acceleration of supply reduction, which, as Matthew Pembleton claims, did little to “alleviate the public health crisis of addiction”. Bush is well known for the Jackson scandal, where he lured a small-time dealer named Jackson near the white house. After giving a televised speech where he held a bag of cocaine and claimed that it was purchased “just steps from the White House”, Jackson was sentenced to 10 years despite being a first-time offender due to “mandatory minimum sentencing laws passed by Congress in 1988”. Furthermore, throughout his presidency, Bush exceeded previous drug spending from any president by $45 billion US dollars, notably increasing the Pentagon’s antinarcotics spending by 100,000 percent. Therefore, the punitive ‘War on Drugs’ can be undeniably deemed a legacy of Reagan and Bush Sr’s approaches to public policy far more than Nixon’s.

The Modern War on Drugs

Since Bush, the war on drugs has unfortunately only seen increased spending in supply reduction, causing disproportionate harm on African American communities and demonstrating the ways in which the political causes for the war on drugs have manifested in greater social inequity within the United States. During the presidencies of Nixon, Reagan and Bush, incarceration rates for African Americans tripled from 1980 to 1999. Nowadays, almost half of the United States’ prison inmates are black, reflecting the systematic targeting of African Americans during the drug war. Moreover, not only did the Republican Party’s ‘Southern Strategy’ gain immense traction from conservative voters; it simultaneously disenfranchised black communities that likely would have voted Democratic as a result of the significantly increased incarceration rates. The enforcement mechanisms for these political tactics were also racist. Overpolicing, police brutality and institutional policies led to increased recidivism rates, systematically keeping African Americans in jail and denying their voting rights. During Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, one in thirteen black people in the United States were disenfranchised by felony conviction laws.

As such, while racism may not have been explicitly at the forefront of Nixon’s initial declaration of war on drugs, it manifestly was a consequence of the drug war, which exacerbated racial divides – and may have even been a cause for the escalation of punitive measures as a political strategy. As German Lopez posits, Nixon’s drug policies, rather than demonstrating “he was a racist, power-hungry politician – [though] he was,” rather indicate “that even well-meaning policies can have big, terrible unintended consequences”. It is plausible that Nixon, at first, did not envision a drug war that would metastasise existing social inequity and public health. However, once Republican politicians found an expedient use for the drug war through which the political landscape of the South could be permanently reshaped, the motivations for the war on drugs morphed into what we know today — criminalisation, incarceration, and lifelong criminal records.