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Despite Drug War, Nixon Called Pot 'Not Particularly Dangerous'

Crime and Justice News

Two years after former President Richard Nixon launched a war on drugs in 1971, calling substance use the nation’s “public enemy No. 1,” he made a startling admission during a meeting in the Oval Office. Speaking to a small group of aides and advisers in March 1973, Nixon said he knew that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.” Nixon, who had publicly argued that curbing drug use globally warranted an “all-out offensive,” also privately expressed unease about the harsh punishments Americans were facing for marijuana crimes. “Penalties should be commensurate with the crime,” Nixon said during that Oval Office conversation, calling a 30-year sentence in a case he recently had learned about “ridiculous.” The remarks were captured on the president’s secret recording system amid a set of tapes that were only recently made widely available, the New York Times reports. A lobbyist for the cannabis industry in Minnesota pored over hours of the tapes and came across the remarks, which leading historians ofn the Nixon era said they found revelatory.


The comments, on scratchy, sometimes hard-to-hear recordings, provide a surprising glimpse into the thinking of the president who implemented the federal government’s drug classification system and decided that marijuana belonged in a category of substances deemed most prone to abuse and of no proved medical value. Over five decades, that designation has led to millions of arrests, which disproportionately affected Black people and hobbled efforts to study rigorously the therapeutic potential of cannabis. New insights into the way Nixon spoke about marijuana are coming to light as federal marijuana policy is being reconsidered. In 2022, President Biden issued a proclamation pardoning thousands of people convicted of certain marijuana crimes under federal law. This spring, the Justice Department signaled its intention to downgrade marijuana in the government’s drug regulatory system, citing a consensus by federal health officials that the plant did not belong in the category of drugs deemed most harmful, known as Schedule I, which includes heroin and LSD Cocaine and fentanyl, for instance, are included in a more lenient category.

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