Rick Holmes is a retired newspaper editor.
MARLBORO-In the spring of 1971, President Richard Nixon faced crises on all sides, from the Pentagon Papers scandal to the rising tide of opposition to his Vietnam War. So he announced a War on Drugs.
Nixon’s motivations for launching his war were largely political. Use of marijuana and other drugs was associated with Black and Hispanic people and with long-haired college students, his chief policy advisor later explained, and those were all groups that supported Democrats.
All these decades later, we have a president who got his political instincts from Nixon and who exceeds Nixon in his cynicism. So Donald Trump, beset by the Epstein scandal and rising opposition to his economic policies, has now declared his own War on Drugs.
Nixon’s War on Drugs was built on unspoken assumptions: That substance abuse was a problem better addressed by the criminal justice system than the public health system; that all drugs were all bad and abstinence was the only acceptable policy; and that experts were best ignored.
Thus Nixon appointed a special commission to study marijuana policy, only to renounce it when it recommended decriminalizing pot possession.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse, created in 1974, was prohibited in its founding documents from funding research on potential positive uses of drugs. Psychedelics, which had shown promise in the treatment of alcoholism and other illnesses, were classified as no better than heroin, and all research ground to a halt.
Police power was expanded, with anti-drug task forces established at the local, state, and federal levels. New prisons were built, and new laws enacted to fill them up with those who used and sold the forbidden drugs.
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Nixon’s War on Drugs outlasted him and then some. The presidents who followed — Republican and Democrat alike — bought into the old, flawed assumptions.
First Lady Nancy Reagan added a slogan: “Just Say No.” Amid public panic over crack cocaine, Bill Clinton (with an assist from then-Sen. Joe Biden) made drug sentences even longer. Two President Bushes kept Nixon’s war going at the federal level, while governors and legislatures at the state level, where most drug crimes are prosecuted, followed suit.
War on Drugs politics ruled for generations. Politicians of both parties, at all levels of government, had to appear tough on drugs if they hoped to be elected.
For a half century, America faced a new drug crisis every few years: marijuana, LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, crack, methamphetamine, Oxycontin, fentanyl. The drugs changed, but national drug policy was always the same: More police, more mass incarceration.
The U.S. prison population rose from 328,000 in 1970 to 1.6 million in 2009. Billions in tax dollars were spent, millions of American lives disrupted. The War on Drugs went on and on, but the drugs kept winning.
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For those who looked closely, there were lessons to be learned along the way. The crystal meth epidemic showed drug addiction could be a rural phenomenon, not just an urban blight, and that hard drugs didn’t have to smuggled across the border.
A meth lab could be built in an isolated barn or the Breaking Bad camper. The crack epidemic prompted more incarceration, but those who have studied crack’s impact on big cities found the tide turned when young people, reinforced by Black movies and hip-hop music, swore off the drug that they had seen decimate their neighborhoods.
The opioid epidemic showed that a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company can be as heartless and destructive as the most notorious narcotics trafficker, and that driving up the price of street drugs isn’t a cure for addiction. When Oxycontin prices spiked, users just switched to heroin and fentanyl.
Eventually, America’s addiction crisis reached so deeply into largely white suburbs and rural communities that people started talking about alternatives to incarceration. In the last decade or so, there’s been a quiet shift in drug policy.
Voters, not politicians, led the charge to decriminalize marijuana in half the country. Officials in conservative states, sick of ever-growing corrections budgets, were the first to put the brakes on mass incarceration. Biden apologized for the excesses of his 1992 crime bill and pardoned nearly 2,500 nonviolent drug offenders.
Research on psychedelics resumed, resulting in promising treatments for depression and other mental illnesses. Harm-reduction strategies like safe injection sites and Narcan to reverse opioid overdoses are saving lives.
New treatments for addiction are showing some success, and the stigma associated with what we now call substance-use disorder is being reduced. New research on brain functions, along with the experiences of families touched by the opioid crisis, reinforced a consensus that addiction is an illness, not a character flaw.
Then, a few steps down the road to a more humane drug policy, along came Donald Trump.
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Trump has paid no attention to the new thinking on drugs. His campaign rhetoric on the subject reflects 1980s-level anti-drug hysteria: not just “lock ’em up,” but the death penalty for drug dealers.
But he and his administration have a mixed record when it comes to drugs. Elon Musk brags about his use of ketamine and other psychedelics, while his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut $11 billion from public health spending on research, drug treatment, and drug use prevention.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks frequently about his struggles with heroin and alcohol addiction, but since becoming secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he has devoted his energy toward undermining childhood vaccination, not helping adults dealing with substance abuse and mental illness.
Meanwhile, Trump has pardoned nearly 100 felony drug traffickers, including drug kingpins in Chicago and Baltimore. This month he pardoned the former president of Honduras, who had been convicted of taking bribes from the drug cartels that terrorized his country and facilitating the smuggling of more than 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.
Is that how you wage war on drugs?
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“War on drugs” is a misleading term to begin with. Nations don’t go to war against substances, and mental illness isn’t fought with guns and prisons.
“Narco-terrorists” — Trump’s term for the enemy — is even more misleading. Terrorism is the use of violence to achieve a political goal. Narcotics is a global industry with billions of customers. You can be a terrorist, or you can be a narcotics supplier; you can’t be both at the same time.
When it comes to the “drugs” part of Trump’s War on Drugs, the president’s rhetoric and actions are contradictory, even incoherent. But what he really likes is the “war” part.
So now he orders the military to blow up small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, no matter that the boats are too small to make it to the U.S. mainland. He threatens to bring his war to Venezuela, no matter that Venezuela mostly sends cocaine to Europe, not fentanyl to the U.S.
It’s hard to know what’s really behind Trump’s war on drugs. He may be more interested in regime change and grabbing a piece of Venezuela’s massive oil reserves than in helping American families struggling with substance abuse.
Either way, Trump’s war on drugs, like Nixon’s, is doomed to failure.
“History repeats itself,” Karl Marx wrote, “first as a tragedy, second as a farce.”
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