The War on Drugs

In 2016, Harper's Magazine published an interview with John Ehrlichman — Nixon's chief domestic policy adviser and a Watergate felon — who had died in 1999. The interviewer, journalist Dan Baum, had been sitting on the quotes for 22 years. Ehrlichman's words have never been credibly disputed:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

This is the founding confession of the War on Drugs. Nixon declared it in 1971. Ehrlichman named what it was: a political weapon designed not to address a public health crisis but to suppress political opposition and terrorize Black communities.

The framing matters because it defines everything downstream: the mandatory minimums, the racial disparities, the private prison boom, the $1 trillion in spending. It was never about drugs. It was about power.

Racial animus in US drug enforcement predates Nixon by decades. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1930–1962), was explicit about his reasoning for criminalizing cannabis. His congressional testimony and public communications during the campaign that produced the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 contain racial slurs and explicit associations between marijuana and Black and Latino communities.

Anslinger told Congress that marijuana caused Black men to "look at white people in the eye" and made Mexican immigrants violent. He promoted news stories — many of which were fabricated — linking marijuana to interracial crime. The legislative record of the 1937 Act is a document of government-sanctioned racial terror.

Anslinger's template — label the drug, attach it to a targeted community, criminalize both — was the model Ehrlichman described Nixon repeating thirty years later. The tool predated Nixon; Nixon industrialized it.

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses that treated crack cocaine — prevalent in Black communities — as 100 times more serious than powder cocaine, the same substance in a different form. Five grams of crack triggered the same five-year mandatory minimum as 500 grams of powder.

The 100:1 disparity had no scientific basis. The US Sentencing Commission recommended eliminating it multiple times, starting in 1995. Congress ignored the recommendations for fifteen years. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the disparity to 18:1 — still not equal. The First Step Act of 2018 made the reduction retroactive, allowing some people to petition for sentence reduction. Thousands served decades under the original formula before any relief was available.

The Sentencing Project documented the outcome: Black Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses at nearly five times the rate of white Americans, despite SAMHSA survey data consistently showing that drug use rates across racial lines are roughly equal. The gap is not explained by different behavior. It is explained by different policing, different charging, and different sentencing — at every step of the system.

In 1996, San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb published "Dark Alliance," a three-part series documenting connections between CIA-linked Nicaraguan Contra networks and crack cocaine distribution in South Central Los Angeles. Webb's central claim: that the CIA was aware of drug trafficking by Contra allies and looked the other way — or actively protected it — because the Contras were a Cold War asset.

The major press initially attacked Webb's series. His newspaper, under pressure, distanced itself from his work. Webb was professionally destroyed. He died by suicide in 2004. In 1998, CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz confirmed in congressional testimony that the CIA had indeed been aware of drug trafficking by Contra operatives and had not reported it to law enforcement — and that in 1982, the Reagan administration had signed a Memorandum of Understanding that specifically exempted the CIA from reporting drug trafficking by its non-employee assets to the DOJ.

The Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations — the Kerry Committee — had documented similar findings in 1989, years before Webb's series. The report found "substantial evidence" that US government agencies and officials condoned drug trafficking by Contra networks. The Reagan administration prioritized anti-communism over drug enforcement in the country it governed. The communities that bore the consequences of the resulting crack epidemic were not consulted.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country on Earth. The War on Drugs is the primary driver of that distinction. Between 1972 and 2014, the US prison and jail population grew from approximately 300,000 to 2.3 million — an increase of more than 700 percent. Drug offenses account for nearly half of all federal prison sentences.

The racial distribution of this incarceration is not proportionate to drug use. The Sentencing Project's analysis of federal and state data shows Black Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses at 4.8 times the rate of white Americans. In some states the disparity exceeds 10:1. SAMHSA's National Survey on Drug Use and Health consistently shows that white and Black Americans report drug use at similar rates.

Mass incarceration compounds itself: a drug conviction makes it harder to find housing, employment, and education; easier to be deported; impossible to vote in some states. The social and economic weight of incarceration falls on families and communities, not just individuals. This is not an unintended consequence. The architects of mandatory minimums understood — and intended — that enforcement would fall disproportionately on Black communities. Ehrlichman said so.

The private prison industry did not exist before the War on Drugs. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now CoreCivic) was founded in 1983. GEO Group was founded in 1984. Both companies grew by offering state and federal governments prison beds at lower per-day costs than public facilities — with the savings achieved primarily by cutting staffing and programming.

As mandatory minimum sentences filled prisons beyond capacity through the 1980s and 1990s, CCA and GEO expanded rapidly. By 2024, GEO Group alone operated 78 facilities and generated $2.4 billion in annual revenue. The companies' earnings track mandatory minimum enforcement almost perfectly: more aggressive sentencing meant more inmates, more beds, more revenue.

The private prison industry has spent tens of millions lobbying for policies that maximize incarceration — opposing early release, opposing sentence reduction, supporting mandatory minimums, and backing candidates who campaign on "law and order." Their business model requires filling beds. Beds are filled by drug arrests. Drug arrests follow the logic established by Anslinger and ratified by Nixon and Reagan. The political economy of mass incarceration is a closed loop.

The Drug Policy Alliance estimates that the United States has spent over $1 trillion on drug prohibition enforcement since Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971. This includes federal and state spending on police, courts, prisons, border interdiction, and foreign military operations (Plan Colombia alone cost $10 billion+).

The result: drug use in the United States has not declined. The proportion of Americans who report using illegal drugs at least once in the past year has held roughly steady for decades. The price of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine has fallen consistently over the past 40 years — the inverse of what supply-side enforcement would produce if it were working. The drugs are cheaper and more potent than when Nixon started the war.

Meanwhile, the opioid epidemic — driven not by street drugs but by pharmaceutical companies and prescribers operating under the supervision of the same Drug Enforcement Administration that ran the War on Drugs — killed over 500,000 Americans between 1999 and 2019. The Sacklers operated openly for twenty years. Their products were legal. The DEA was aware of overprescribing patterns years before acting.

The War on Drugs imprisoned marijuana users while pharmaceutical companies legally distributed opioids that killed half a million people. The selective application of drug enforcement — brutal toward Black and Latino communities, deferential toward white pharmaceutical executives — is not an accident. It is the system working as designed.