Nixon Admitted Pot Was 'Not Particularly Dangerous' in Newly Uncovered Audio

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Yahoo! News/Rolling Stone

Sat, September 14, 2024 at 6:44 PM EDT


Former President Richard Nixon, who launched the war on drugs in 1971 that has had repercussions to this day, admitted he knew marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.” His admission during a meeting with a group of aides at the White House was recorded in March 1973, via his secret recording system.

It was only recently made available after a lobbyist for the cannabis industry came across the conversation amid listening through hours of tapes, as The New York Times reports. “Let me say, I know nothing about marijuana,” he said. “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.”

Though he publicly argued that drug abuse was “public enemy number one,” he privately questioned during the meeting the extreme punishments Americans were subjected to for marijuana crimes. “Penalties should be commensurate with the crime,” Nixon said during that Oval Office conversation, noting a 30-year sentence in a cannabis case he recently learned about and added, “The penalties are ridiculous.”

“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,” Nixon said. Despite Nixon’s reticence over the harsh criminalization for marijuana, he instituted the federal government’s drug classification system, and he designated marijuana among the substances believed to be most abused and deemed as having no proven medical value.

Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/nixon-admitted-pot-not-particularly-224401462.html

[slightlv]

1. The whole war on drugs was started because of racists!

And we've paid the price ever since... damn him!

[jfz9580m]

17. It seems to be the sole form of regulation

Favoured by such segments of society-draconian crackdowns on pot users..

[Kid Berwyn]

2. Drug War on Hippies and "the Blacks."

“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.”

— John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

Source: https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past-is-never-dead/drug-war-confessional

[moniss]

7. At the time they were doing it many of us knew

the real reasons and it was frustrating beyond words to try and get people to believe it only to be brushed aside as a "radical".

[Kid Berwyn]

8. I remember. Nixon on tape...

From “Just What Was He Smoking?,” WaPo 2002:

The excerpts begin with the Nixon doctrine on why marijuana is much worse than alcohol: It is because people drink "to have fun" but they smoke marijuana "to get high." This distinction was evidently enormously significant to Nixon, because he repeats it twice.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2002/03/21/just-what-was-he-smoking/e984a758-94fc-482f-a9d7-890c30a41b5e/

High School friends had a Frisbee beach bluff party night the bastard resigned. We couldn’t imagine how much worse things would become.

[moniss]

9. Yes and that distinction for alcohol was all

the more glaring for many of us because we came through the '50's with the advent of pills and booze problems for the "good people". The amphetamines to get you up and going and the barbiturates to bring you down in order to sleep. All swashed around with cocktails. Between that and readily available codeine the suits and ties and their wives had what they "needed" while some kid with a joint was a menace to society.

[hunter]

3. Generally, if you were a clean-cut white kid caught with a little pot you'd be given a "warning."

If you were not white you'd be beaten up and arrested.

The town I grew up in was 99% white. Our high school had a large population of pot smokers. The cops generally left them alone. Some of them were the children of cops.

If a not-white person was ever caught smoking pot in our town that was the last you ever saw of them.

This kind of selective enforcement was one of the ways the town kept itself white.

In some places this kind of selective enforcement was extended to white "non-conformists,"
LGBTQ people, peace activists, etc. I've got personal stories of that ilk, of police harassment based on the pretext that I "might" have drugs.

Nixon knew exactly how that worked.

[moniss]

10. Yes and I've written before about how

it was in smaller towns if you were "not marching to the tune" because in some towns you just never got that "promotion" or never got that car loan approved. I remember a lady who was doing environmental activism and her son was targeted in high school by the teachers and the principal. Before she started speaking up the son had no problems with them. Small towns can be great or they can be hell. Been on the whole range.

[AZLD4Candidate]

4. Instead of a war on poverty, they have a war on drugs so the police can bother me - 2pac

[DJ Synikus Makisimus]

5. Pot arrests allowed police to boost statistics.

"Lies, damn lies and statistics." Crime statistics drive funding to law enforcement. It's how "we" determine that "we" are effectively fighting crime. If boosting statistics are the goal, and that's basically the game in criminal justice from top to bottom, you need "solvable" crimes with high conviction rates. In the case of "the war on drugs," marijuana arrests were generally a bit easier than tracking down heroin and cocaine traffickers. Trafficking pot profitably takes up way more space (for scale, think hay bales as opposed to kilogram-sized packages), and even a human can smell it.

The Military-Police-Prison-Surveillance Industrial Complex thrives on these sorts of statistical gymnastics. If crime goes up, they need more funding to fight it. If crime goes down, they need more money to keep their "finely-tuned edge." All the while, they need more laws that make more easily-targeted criminals. That's the game, and Nixon knew it. J. Edgar Hoover built his lifetime appointment off of it: busting low-level gangsters was preferable to busting the Mafia don to take the entire operation down. Better for the statistics.

[Aristus]

6. Even though I was just a kid back in the '70's,

I can remember newspaper reports of drug busts that worded: “…the suspect, crazed on marijuana…”

I was still too young to understand that you don’t get ‘crazed’’ on marijuana. Just more press sensationalism in service to the white power structure.

[ArkansasDemocrat1]

15. The only way I get crazed on mmj is if it gives me the munchies

I thought stuff like Reefer Madness was hilarious 40 years ago when MTV would show it. Now, it would just be sad to watch. People's lives destroyed over a shrub. SMH

https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/how-to-stop-munchies-when-high

[Caribbeans]

11. Maybe if they didn't erase it from history books

more people would have called BS

But they did and those responsible caused an entire nation to go to war against a plant. They deserved to hang.

The United States government denied ever having made such a film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_for_Victory

Since WW2 war IS the US

(Not Jack in the thumb)

One of the greatest Americans of the 20th century. He fought daily to restore history and at first most called him a kook or a conspiracy theorist.

[MagickMuffin]

14. I gave Jimmy Carter one of Jack Herer's book

Jack was very knowledgeable about cannabis. I remember my grandma talking about cannabis medicine.

Another gop manufactured crisis to limit personal freedom!

[valleyrogue]

12. What was sold on the street then did not have the THC levels that are commonly sold now.

Big difference. I am not big on MJ legalization. It is more trouble than it is worth.

[MagickMuffin]

13. "not particularly dangerous." Until we sprayed it with paraquat

You remember that toxic herbicide that you decided you should poison us with!

[Xolodno]

16. Absinthe...aka the Green Fairy..

...was once outlawed. I knew people who went out of their way to obtain it. Now its legal, meh. Stuff is awful, so it never took off, just the novelty fueled sales once legalized. States that have legalized had a huge initial bump in sales....now, a lot of dispensaries are going belly up.

More proof, prohibition never works.