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@JoeStewart

Thank you. I’m continually surprised by my ignorance and the ease with which I accept as fact things I read and watch….

For what its worth before seeing this post I beleive the typical narrative of Nixon being the bad guy who started the war on drugs too.

What got me was when i was reading this i went “wait a second, they made it sound like he made heroin illegal, coulda swore it was already illegal”… I looked it up and sure enough it was made illegal 44 years earlier.

So then, beleiving my original assumptions must be true I went “Well surely he at least made it more illegal”.. so i looked up his exactly policy and read it and read his quotes. To my shock he actually passed laws that specifically reduced criminality, making pocession a misdemeanor for all drugs which used to be a felony.

After that I went and researched the quote and found it to be utterly fake. and well… we arrived at my post :)

The outcomes I was referring to relate to those delivered by decades of the “war on drugs.” In particular, the narco traffickers and the induced migration of those fleeing the resulting violence not to mention the focus on enforcement and incarceration rather than treatment and prevention.

The war on drugs certainly started with Nixon indirectly with the formation of the DEA. Nixon wanted less criminality, but actual enforcement. He thought drug abuse was a true ill to society as far as I could tell, so he did want to eliminate it, but he didnt want everyone to just wind up in jail. He largely wanted to target,it seems, the dealers and producers and leave the users out of it as far as severe punishments go. This was absolutely an improvement from the felony charges people used to get.

The problem is the DEA took on a life of its own, after Nixon it grew, became more pervasive, and the penalties started to increase again.

So one can argue that Nixon started a chain of events that ultimately led to the drug war and its abuse on the people. But when Nixon started it it wasnt like that, and as I said it actually was a lessening of charges.