6. The Johnson administration cracked down on drugs during 1968
1968 was an election year, and one of considerable social unrest in the United States, with race riots, protests against the Vietnam War, riots in Chicago during the Democratic Convention that summer, and much more. President Lyndon Johnson decided that the unrest within the population was being fed by the use of illegal drugs, and initiated a crackdown. Republican candidate Richard Nixon railed at the Johnson administration for not doing enough, and promised a far greater crackdown on drug use if elected. It was Nixon who coined the term “War on Drugs”, though not until he was in office. Experts advising the Johnson administration and the Nixon campaign believed that more than half of the crime in the United States was related to drug use. Some experts believed that up to 90% of American crime was drug related.
Nixon’s aide John Ehrlichman became his Chief Domestic Advisor during his first term after serving for a time as White House Counsel. It was Erlichman who eventually created the White House Plumbers of Watergate fame. In 1994 Ehrlichman told Harper’s Magazine, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people…by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities”. Ehrlichman went on in the same interview, “Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did”. Nixon entered the White House in 1969. Two years later he declared illegal drug use to be “public enemy number one” and announced the new government policy of the “War on Drugs”.