Nixon Declares Drug Abuse "Public Enemy Number One"

At a press conference on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one,” launching what became known as the War on Drugs. This announcement marked the beginning of a dramatic expansion of federal drug control policy and law enforcement that would transform American criminal justice and drive mass incarceration for the next five decades. During the nearly 50-year period between 1925 and the early 1970s, the male incarceration rate had remained remarkably stable at about 200 per 100,000 population. By 1986, about a decade after the War on Drugs started, the male incarceration rate doubled to 400 per 100,000, then doubled again to more than 800 by 1996 before reaching a historic peak of 956 in 2008.

The devastating scope and intent of Nixon’s drug war was revealed decades later through notes from journalist Dan Baum’s 1994 interview with John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, published in Harper’s Magazine in 2016. Ehrlichman stated: “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 blacks, 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 in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The War on Drugs became one of the most destructive policy initiatives in American history, directly contributing to the explosion of incarceration from 300,000 to 2.3 million people. Half of those in federal prison are incarcerated for drug offenses, and two-thirds of those in prison for drug offenses are people of color. The policy shifts propelled by the drug war had disproportionately large effects on African Americans and Latinos, with serving time in prison becoming a normal life event among recent birth cohorts of African American men who have not completed high school. The criminalization apparatus Nixon created became a tool for systematic racial control and political repression, demonstrating how federal policy could be weaponized to target dissent and minority communities under the guise of public safety.