Richard Nixon Secretly Admitted Marijuana Is ‘Not Particularly Dangerous,’ New Tapes Reveal

Two years after launching the War on Drugs, calling substance use “public enemy No. 1,” President Richard Nixon privately acknowledged marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.” The admission came during a March 1973 Oval Office meeting with aides and was captured on Nixon’s secret recording system.

“Let me say, I know nothing about marijuana,” Nixon 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.” He also mentioned harsh sentencing in cannabis cases. “The penalties should be commensurate with the crime.” He called a 30-year sentence for marijuana-related offenses “ridiculous.”

These comments were revealed in a series of tapes that have recently become accessible.

Kurtis Hanna, a Minnesota lobbyist and advocate for drug legalization, discovered the recordings while browsing the Nixon Library’s archives. Hanna said he was surprised by Nixon’s stance on cannabis, as it contradicted the public policies he spearheaded. “He was essentially saying the exact opposite of what I understood him to believe,” said Hanna who shared his findings with The New York Times, which published them on Saturday.

Nixon’s private remarks present a startling contrast to his administration’s public policies that are still in effect, including the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which established a classification system for drugs. Marijuana was placed in Schedule I, the most restrictive category, alongside heroin and LSD and it remains there to this day.

Enter The DEA

This classification has contributed to millions of marijuana-related arrests, disproportionately impacting Black communities. It has also stymied scientific research into cannabis’s potential medical benefits. To carry out his war on drugs, Nixon created the DEA in 1973. Now, fifty-one years and over $1 trillion dollars later, the war on drugs is still ineffectual though it has claimed thousands of victims.

Read Also: DEA Can Still Make Cannabis Arrests In Legal Weed States Like Ohio, But It’s Not ‘Our Goal’

War On Drugs: John Ehrlichman

In a 2016 Harper’s Magazine article, Dan Baum provided more details on drug prohibition and how it became a national obsession under Nixon.

Baum asked Nixon’s top advisor, John Ehrlichman in 1994 how the U.S. got entangled in a drug prohibition policy that “yielded so much misery and so few good results.”

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people,” replied Ehrlichman who died in 1999. 

“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,” Ehrlichman admitted. “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.”

On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned as president due to impeachment proceedings underway against him for his involvement in the Watergate affair. On April 22, 1994, Nixon died at 81.

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Photo: Brittanica