What Was the War on Drugs? Part I

Introduction

A couple of years ago I was the recipient of the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship from the Fund for American Studies. In the course of that fellowship, I wrote a number of chapters for a book that, as happens with so many books, was not successfully sold.

As a result, I put a great deal of work into researching essays that never saw the light of day. While I have repurposed some of that work, I have long wanted to be able to reference other output from that fellowship in subsequent writings, only to remember that it has never been formally published anywhere.

This series adapts an essay, never previously published, which offers a revisionist history of the War on Drugs. I am obliged to thank the Fund for American Studies for helping me write it.

This is the first installment. There will be five in total, released at a relatively fast tempo. Expect part II, on the Nixon administration, soon.

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In May of 2009, just a few months after President Barack Obama took office, Gil Kerlikowske was installed as the sixth director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Often called the nation’s “Drug Czar,” ONDCP’s director oversees the federal government’s sprawling, often unwieldy efforts to control drugs and their problems. The Director also helps set the White House’s tone on drugs, which has historically been a firm one. William Bennett, the first director of ONDCP, once remarked that he had no moral problem with beheading street dealers.¹ And when Bill Clinton wanted to prove his tough-on-drugs bona fides, he selected Barry McCaffrey, a four-star general decorated for his service in the Gulf War.

Which is why it was so surprising when, just a few days after he took office, Kerlikowske called the War on Drugs a failure.

“In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske said in an interview with the Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."² He told the Wall Street Journal that he wanted to dump the phrase “War on Drugs” altogether, explaining that “regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them.”³ This rhetorical commitment persisted. In the 2013 National Drug Control Strategy, for example, Kerlikowske would write proudly of how the Obama administration had rejected a “law enforcement-only ‘war on drugs.’”⁴

Kerlikowske’s comments followed the Obama administration’s commitment to moving away from law and order and towards public health. But they also reflected the way in which the phrase “War on Drugs” has collapsed in popularity. In a 2012 poll by anti-drug-war magazine Reason, 80 percent of Americans said the War on Drugs had failed.⁵ That’s remained true since Obama left office. in a 2021 poll run by the American Civil Liberties Union, 83 percent of Americans said that they believed the War on Drugs had failed; 65 percent supported “ending” it.⁶

Why don’t Americans like the War on Drugs? To be fair, the standard picture of it is quite unappealing. The War on Drugs, the story goes, was started by Richard Nixon, primarily—John Ehrlichman once claimed—as a way to turn the American public against black people and hippies. This “moral panic” over drugs, which were never really that big of a problem, persisted, driving an insanely harsh backlash. Over the next fifty years, the United States spent a trillion dollars to lock up millions of people, most of them black, for the crime of possessing drugs. In so doing, they went to war on everyday Americans, destroyed communities, and created America’s mass-incarceration problem without making the supposed drug problem any better.

This version of events serves a political purpose. Popular discontent with the War on Drugs—the sense of its basic illegitimacy—is a major driver of support for drug liberalization. The War on Drugs has become a bogey-man, the thing to which reformers point as the only alternative to their preferred way forward. How, after all, can a right-thinking person not want to move away from the horror that was the Drug War—and therefore, presumably, make peace with drugs?

It matters, then, that we get the story of the War on Drugs right. And the standard story—the story you have probably been told over and over again—is quite simply wrong. It is, in fact, profoundly, deliberately misleading.

Richard Nixon, for example, may have declared drugs “America’s public enemy number one.” But he did so in response to an acute heroin crisis, not to score cheap votes in the South. Nixon also spent more on drug treatment than enforcement every year after, and pioneered the use of methadone maintenance treatment.

Despite what critics claim, there is no fifty-year straight line from Nixon to Reagan’s drug war. Drug policy actually liberalized throughout the United States in the mid-to-late 1970s, reflecting and reinforcing an enormous surge in drug use, particularly among teenagers. It was this surge that first prompted a massive grassroots parent movement—ignored and forgotten by most modern drug-war historians—to demand government do something.

Even then, it took the crack epidemic—one of the most devastating drug crises of the 20^th century—to spur real, aggressive action. When that action came, it too was supported by a popular, grassroots movement, one often led by the very same black Americans the drug war ostensibly was designed to oppress. And, at least at first, this effort produced real results, as the number of drug users plummeted and neighborhoods, once blighted by crack, came back from the brink.

The War on Drugs, in short, deserves to be remembered for what it was: a popular reform movement targeting a major social problem. That popular movement, furthermore, did substantial work to fix the harms an uncontrolled drug culture had wrought.

At the same time, though, the War on Drugs does not deserve unqualified praise. The reality is that by the late 1990s, progress in the “war” had stalled. And that stalling was entirely predictable, a function of the inherent difficulty of shaping demand for addictive substances. After a certain point, it turns out, it quickly becomes very hard to police your way out of a drug crisis.

The War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s is not the right way forward for our current drug problems. But a correct understanding of the it should give us a sense that culture makes a difference: that it does actually matter, despite what you may have heard, whether or not we as a society are willing to “just say no.”

1. Howard Kohn, “Cowboy in the Capital: Drug Czar Bill Bennett,” Rolling Stone, November 2, 1989, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cowboy-in-the-capital-drug-czar-bill-bennett-45472/.

2. Martha Mendoza, “U.S. Drug War Has Met None of Its Goals,” NBC News, May 13, 2010, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna37134751.

3. Gary Fields, “White House Czar Calls for End to ‘War on Drugs,’” Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2009, sec. US, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124225891527617397.

4. “National Drug Control Strategy” (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2013), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/ondcp/policy-and-research/ndcs_2013.pdf.

5. Emily Ekins, “Poll: 82 Percent Say US Losing War on Drugs,” Reason.Com, August 20, 2013, sec. Civil Liberties, https://reason.com/2013/08/20/poll-82-percent-say-us-losing-war-on-dru/.

6. “Poll Results on American Attitudes Toward War on Drugs” (American Civil Liberties Union, June 9, 2021), https://www.aclu.org/documents/poll-results-american-attitudes-toward-war-drugs.