Summary Of Nixon's War On Drugs

Although Richard Nixon first declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, the war escalated during the Reagan presidency and shifted its focus from treatment toward incarceration and law enforcement. As George Moss and Evan Thomas explain, Reagan came to Washington “committed to waging a war on drugs and bringing the international drug trade under control” in 1981. Thanks to the rise of the Medellin Cartel in Colombia and other cartels in Latin America during the 1980s, illegal drug trade networks flourished, and America became “the world’s major consumer of illicit drugs.” This increased usage of drugs led to many social crises, including heightened urban crime and health problems, which encouraged both the Reagan administration and private groups
to take a strong stand domestically against the usage of drugs. Efforts against the spread of drug usage included President Reagan enacting mandatory minimum sentences for drug charges and programs such as D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, but although drug awareness increased, the era of Reagan’s administration is today characterized by “its inability to slow the great American appetite for drugs.” This essay studies historical depictions of the leaders of the domestic war on drugs during its heyday, the 1980s. Although criticism of the domestic war on drugs is common, exactly what scholars have chosen to critique varies across disciplines. Two areas of focus arise among the war on drugs’ critics: why a problem exists and what that problem actually is. No scholar entirely avoids one question in favor of the other, but each does choose which question to prioritize. This essay focuses on seemingly different interpretations of who were the central actors during the 1980s’ war on drugs. Political scientist Cigdem Sirin explicitly focuses on the importance of the presidency in asking why a problem exists, as does professor and “enthusiastic soldier in the war on drugs” Stephen Easton, who presents data that argues for the benefit of escalating the war on drugs. While the team of professors and public policy analysts behind Drug War Politics agrees with this depiction of the president’s centrality, it also insists on emphasizing other important actors, such as Congress, in shaping national action. Similarly, historian Gil Troy highlights the role of organizations like Just Say No and political scientists Kenneth Meier and Kevin Smith analyze the Drug Enforcement Administration, but even in discussing these organizations they return to the role of President Reagan. Social development professor Susan Boyd and drug reform advocate Deborah Small study the effects of the drug war on disadvantaged groups rather than discussing the war’s perpetrators; Small presents the common argument that “the war on drugs is a war on racial justice,” while Boyd specifically studies how drug law has affected women. Nevertheless, this shifted focus on the part of both authors still reiterates President Reagan’s role in creating inequality. Analysis of the perspectives of scholars spanning three decades—the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s—and diverse academic disciplines provides a range of actors involved in creating the “war on drugs,” but it also demonstrates minimal change over time in scholarly perceptions of this war, for even as the authors explore the leadership of different groups and agencies, they still all return to the influential force of Ronald Reagan. Cigdem Sirin’s 2011 article “From Nixon's War on Drugs to Obama's Drug Policies Today: Presidential Progress in Addressing Racial Injustices and Disparities” emphasizes the importance of the president in setting drug policy, a theme that other historians corroborate with less intentional focus.
Sirin writes that her article “investigates presidential progress in addressing racial injustices and disparities within the context of the war on drugs” and argues that the possibility for racial justice depends on a progressive president choosing its pursuit as a personal agenda. Sirin examines the drug policies of presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, and when discussing President Reagan, she gives him responsibility for the “punitive policies that disproportionately affected certain racial/ethnic groups” found in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. She underscores his advocacy for federal mandatory minimum sentences, which created “the notorious 100 to 1 provision” under which five grams of crack cocaine carried the same prison sentence, five years, as 500 grams of powder cocaine. After explaining that crack cocaine users were typically poor and black, she notes that the resulting racial disparity in sentencing stayed in place until President Obama’s Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. Sirin clarifies that a progressive president will struggle without the legislature, judiciary, or public opinion, but she still holds that “most importantly, the president in office should have a progressive agenda to begin with in order to initiate and work towards key structural changes and policy reforms.” For this reason, according to her estimation, the president defines drug
policy. Kenneth Meier and Kevin Smith’s 1994 article “Say It Ain't So, Moe: Institutional Design, Policy Effectiveness, and Drug Policy” actually questions the effectiveness of president-driven initiatives in the case of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), but this critique comes from a theory that assumes that the best policy bureaucracies come from the presidential office. Their claim that the DEA has been “hobbled by self-generated institutional flaws and poorly conceived policies” is informed by several criticisms. They note, for example, that drug agencies “engage in systematic information distortion” to make the effects of illegal drugs seem severe, also adding that the process of arresting people both allows corruption on the part of officers deciding who to arrest and rewards the quantity of arrests rather than discretion on who to target. However, what makes these failings egregious to Meier and Smith is their belief in Terry Moe’s theory that the president is more likely that any other government entity to have the capacity to put together “bureaucracies with discretion, flexibility, and the capacity for action.” Thus, they blame drug enforcement agencies’ failure partially on the inaction or failings on recent presidencies. Sirin’s argument complements that of Meier and Smith, for while “Say it Ain’t So, Moe” studies the failures of drug enforcement agencies with an emphasis on the role of the president, “From Nixon’s War on Drugs to Obama’s Drug Policies” focuses on the importance of the president with a nod to the institutions that must support them. Stephen Easton’s belief in the efficacy of the war on drugs makes him an anomaly among scholars of the war on drugs, but in his 2002 article “Everybody Knows It, But Is It True? A Challenge to the Conventional Wisdom that the War on Drugs Is Ineffective,” he too focuses his analysis on the impact of the president on both drug usage and its perception. Opening with the concession, “This analysis will be conducted by one who readily admits that he is not an unbiased source of information about the war on drugs” because of his work prosecuting drug distribution cases as an attorney under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Easton explains that his analysis links escalations or de-escalations in the drug war to both high school seniors’ attitudes about drug use and illegal drug usage rates for that same demographic. He praises Reagan for escalating the war on drugs on all fronts: federal spending, incarceration numbers, mandatory minimum sentences, and public awareness campaigns. As he explains, during Reagan’s presidency, disapproval of even “occasional” drug use among high school seniors rose from 50% to 74% and reported illegal drug use among those same students fell from 53% to 38.5%. Easton suggests that the relationship between Reagan’s strong stance on escalation and these dramatic changes is causal. Other studies would qualify Easton’s conclusions on usage rates by adding that only casual drug use decreased during the 1980s, since these campaigns “influenced middle- and upper-middle-class youth who indulged in marijuana and powdered cocaine, not crack or heroin,” but the “sea change in [American] attitudes” toward drugs during the 1980s is almost universally attributed to Ronald and Nancy Reagan. If high school seniors’ attitudes toward illegal drugs and casual drug usage rates are the metric for success in the war on drugs, Easton’s belief in its success is well-founded. Even more notably, Easton again attributes the effects of the war on drugs to the presidents who waged it.