Well, well, well, so the guy who rubber stamped the so called ‘War on Drugs’ in 1971, did not think weed was a bad drug. Not surprising. Alright, in a newly unearthed recording from March 1973, way back in the day, former President Richard Nixon admitted that he knew marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.” Despite buddy’s role in declaring the war on drugs and rejecting a federal commission’s recommendation to decriminalize it he said:
“Let me say, I know nothing about marijuana. I know that it’s not particularly dangerous, in other words, and most of the kids are for legalizing it. But on the other hand, it’s the wrong signal at this time.” He also criticized overly harsh penalties, stating that a 30-year sentence for cannabis was “ridiculous.”
The recordings were recently discovered by Minnesota cannabis lobbyist Kurtis Hanna in a trove of materials uploaded by the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. What else is in there? One might wonder.
What’s wild is Nixon’s comments contrast sharply with his public image as a staunch opponent of drug use. In 1971, he declared drug misuse “public enemy number one” and began the war on drugs. The following year, he dismissed the recommendations of the Shafer Commission, a group he had appointed to study marijuana laws. The commission had suggested decriminalizing marijuana, arguing that “criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession” and that the harm of marijuana use was “not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior.”
Nixon ignored the commission’s findings but privately acknowledged that marijuana penalties were excessive.
In another recording the disgraced former President said:
“I have no problem that there should be an evaluation of penalties on it, and there should not be penalties that, you know, like in Texas that people get 10 years for marijuana. That’s wrong.” Despite these remarks, Nixon made it clear that he did not support full legalization, stating, “But we are not for legalization, I don’t want to encourage the drug thing.”
Hanna remarked, “President Nixon, the man who signed the bill into law to put marijuana in Schedule I, who kept it in Schedule I after the Shafer Commission report, and who created the Drug Enforcement Administration through administrative action didn’t believe marijuana was addictive or dangerous.”
What’s really disturbing is Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, later revealed in a 1994 interview that the war on drugs was partly a political strategy to target “the anti-war left and Black people.” He stated, “By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
These very telling unearthed tapes shed light on Nixon’s complex and contradictory stance on marijuana, revealing that his public policy decisions were not always aligned with his private beliefs.
Who would have thunk it. Apparently Nixon did.The post Former President Nixon Declared ‘War on Drugs’ But Privately Said Weed ‘Not Dangerous’ In Unearthed Tapes first appeared on The Source.The post Former President Nixon Declared ‘War on Drugs’ But Privately Said Weed ‘Not Dangerous’ In Unearthed Tapes appeared first on The Source.
