Wasted Federal Money: We Are Long Overdue for Change

When examined in context, over the long term, it all begins to make sense (at least to anyone who’s studied the matter at all);

Nixon’s “War on Drugs” was purely a manipulative election ploy designed to obliquely instill fear in the American public, by creating in their imagination the false perception of a massive national crisis (substance use, primarily cannabis, and predominately, if not almost exclusively, among/by college/university students), and to portray them as depraved, and anti-American, because they opposed the Vietnam War, then…

Well, just read what John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Domestic Affairs Policy Advisor, and convicted Watergate co-conspirator, said to Dan Baum when interviewed by him, for a book he was writing at the time:

“You want to know what this 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.”

On November 17, 1973, then-POTUS Richard Nixon spoke at Disney’s Contemporary Resort in Bay Lake, FL, to the Associated Press Managing Editors annual conference. During the Question and Answer portion after his address, a New York Times reporter asked him about his role in the Watergate burglary scandal and efforts to cover up that members of his Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) had funded the break-in.
In response, he said in part, that, “I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service — I earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.”

When Nixon ignored the recommendation to decriminalize cannabis made by his hand-picked Commissioner Raymond P. Shafer in the report commonly known as the “Shafer Commission,” properly as the First Report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, March 1972, and then created the DEA — a law enforcement agency — in 1973, and made illegal ALL sorts of hitherto then-legal substances, the unintended consequence and byproduct of which was the creation of massive global narcotrafficking crime cartels, the likes of which the world has NEVER seen, which far surpassed in scope all evil perpetrated by gangsters like Al Capone, Ma Barker, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, Babyface Nelson, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, et al, both in their wickedness, and depravity, and eclipsing the killings they — and ALL OTHERS COMBINED — did.

American Prohibition v.2.0, on Cannabis, and other substances, has been exorbitantly costly to our nation economically, not only because of enforcement, but for massive incarceration — which itself remains a huge extraction and extirpation from our national economy, and from families, of predominately minority men, including the disenfranchisement of their voting rights, and access to Federal services, such as FmHA, VA housing loans, Pell higher education grants, student loans, SBA entrepreneurship loans, etc.

America’s Prohibition II has been, and remains costly to other nations who followed suit under pressure from the U.S. Government to enact similar laws and pursue similar actions, and NOTHING of any good has come of it. Just look at what now comes from China — fentanyl — because it’s cheap and easy to synthesize, no opium poppy plants required, just some chemicals, and a big lab to manufacture it all. But even long-term opiate users don’t like fentanyl, not because it’s deadly, but because the euphoric sensation that heroin, or other opiates provided is absent in fentanyl.A

Anyone familiar with history of the so-called “opium dens” (folks would literally smoke opium) in San Francisco, New York, and other large metropolitan cities in other nations some years ago, many, if not most, or even all, of which were Chinese in nature, and itself, was not a reaction to a problem, per se, but a racist response to Oriental folks, and the imaginary dangers they posed when they brought with them a practice enjoyed in their homeland, like cannabis was in Mexico. That such actions were racist in nature is inescapable when reading excerpts from news articles of the day such as, “Two white girls, neither of whom were over 17 years of age, dressed in clothes usually reserved for a Sunday picnic” written in 1882 by a female undercover reporter for San Francisco’s The Examiner who investigated a local opium den.

But one thing you don’t see? Articles about opium den overdose deaths, opium den rapes, opium den robberies, or other opium den-related criminality. It’s just not there. Folks got their high, knew when to quit, and nodded off. How dangerous is that? Today, we have infectious, often incurable diseases spread by injectable drugs, overdose deaths, and killings by the untold hundreds of thousands, more likely as millions, from trafficking.

Moreover, NO ONE EVER has waked up one day and said to themselves, “Gee… I think I want to become an addict,” and NO ONE EVER has had a life goal to become an addict.

The practically EXCLUSIVE reason why people turn to substance abuse, licit, or illicit, is because of pain, physical or psychological, and an inability to effectively deal with emotional/psychological trauma and the associated pain. ALWAYS. And had we invested the money wasted in the DEA and international eradication efforts into mental health, we’d be so far ahead, above and beyond the power curve, that, again, had we done that, we would not recognize ourselves today. And when further considered, folks don’t commit mass killings — riots, or shootings — because they’re happy, you know.

On The Andy Griffith Show, the character Barney Fife, Deputy Sheriff of Mayberry, would often say, “Nip it! Nip it! Nip it in the bud!”

We have failed to do that.

A final note on Nixon, and his election in ’68, and re-election in ’72:

Nixon’s ’68 election (301 Electoral College Votes, 32 States, 43.4% Popular Vote), against George C. Wallace–American Independent (46EV, 5 States, 13.5%PV) (then-Alabama Governor, crippled while campaigning in Maryland by Arthur Bremer’s attempted assassin’s bullets), Hubert Humphrey-D (191EV, 13 States, 42.7%PV) (incumbent VP to LBJ), with 60.8% Voter Turnout.

Nixon’s re-election was a landslide to beat all landslides, with 60.7% of the Popular Vote, and 520 Electoral College votes (49 of 50 states), with 55.2% Voter Turnout.

Nixon was a corrupt SOB, just like his VP Spiro Agnew, who resigned amidst discovery of felony corruption, kickbacks which continued into his Vice Presidency, which spot was then filled by Gerald Ford. And when Nixon resigned, Ford became the first POTUS in U.S. history to NEVER have been elected to either post — VPOTUS, or POTUS. Yet, it was under Nixon’s administration that the Clean Air Act, creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act (in principle), and other important legislation was passed.