Nixon's War on Drugs (jun 1, 1971 – jun 1, 1974)

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Nixon’s War on Drugs, launched in the early 1970s, was a U.S. government campaign aimed at reducing illegal drug use. Officially framed as a public health and safety effort, it introduced harsher penalties for drug offenses and increased federal funding for law enforcement and drug control agencies. While it was publicly race-neutral, the War on Drugs disproportionately targeted Black communities. Arrests and incarceration rates for drug offenses soared (especially for non-violent crimes) and Black Americans were (and still are) far more likely to be imprisoned than white Americans for the same offenses.

In 1994, former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman revealed the strategy’s racial intent, stating:
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? 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.”

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