Former President Richard Nixon, despite declaring the war on drugs and rejecting a federal commission’s recommendation to decriminalize marijuana, admitted in a newly unearthed recording that he knew cannabis is “not particularly dangerous.”
“Let me say, I know nothing about marijuana,” Nixon said in a March 1973 White House meeting. “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.”
“The penalties should be commensurate with the crime,” Nixon said, arguing that a 30-year sentence in a cannabis case he recently heard about was “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,” the president said.
The comments, first reported by the New York Times, come as the federal government is reconsidering marijuana’s status as a restricted Schedule I drug.
The Department of Health and Human Services, after conducting a review initiated by President Joe Biden, recommended last year that cannabis should be moved to Schedule III. The Department of Justice agreed, publishing a proposed rescheduling rule in the Federal Register in May.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), however, has expressed hesitation about enacting the reform, however, and has scheduled a public hearing on the cannabis rescheduling matter for December 2, after the upcoming presidential election.
Listen to Nixon’s marijuana comments, starting around 15:00 into the audio below:
Nixon’s admission in the newly revealed tapes that marijuana is “not particularly dangerous” runs in contrast to his image as a drug warrior and undermines his and subsequent administrations’ decisions to classify it in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, which is supposed to be reserved for substances with a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical value.
On June 17, 1971, Nixon declared at a press conference that drug misuse was “public enemy number one,” saying that “in order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.”
In 1972, Nixon rejected the recommendation of a federal commission that recommended decriminalizing cannabis.
When Nixon appointed so-called Shafer Commission to research and issue a report on federal marijuana laws, most people expected it to bolster the administration’s position that cannabis was a dangerous drug that ought to be criminalized. But that’s not what members concluded in their report.
The panel, which was formally titled the “National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse,” found that while marijuana use might pose some health risks, the policy of criminalization is excessive and unnecessary. The report from the 14-member commission, which had been appointed by Nixon himself and congressional leaders, recommended decriminalization.
“A coherent social policy requires a fundamental alteration of social attitudes toward drug use, and a willingness to embark on new courses when previous actions have failed,” the commission wrote.
The panel’s report stated plainly that “criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession even in the effort to discourage use.”
“It implies an overwhelming indictment of the behavior which we believe is not appropriate. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only with the greatest reluctance,” it said.
Therefore, the commission concluded that reforms be enacted so that “possession of marihuana for personal use no longer be an offense, [and the] casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration, no longer be an offense.”
Nixon ignored the findings but then, the next year, made the newly discovered comments about marijuana not being “particularly dangerous,”
The newly noticed recordings were shared with the New York Times after being dug up by Minnesota cannabis lobbyist Kurtis Hanna in a trove of recent uploads by the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.
“President Nixon, the man who signed the bill into law to put marijuana in Schedule I, who kept it in Schedule I after the Shafer Commission report, and who created the Drug Enforcement Administration through administrative action didn’t believe marijuana was addictive or dangerous,” Hanna told Marijuana Moment.
“Jack Herer declared in 1973, ‘The Emperor Wears No Clothes,’ in his book by the same name,” Hanna said. “Through the release of the audio I found, we now have definitive proof of the Emperor himself admitting in private that he knew he was naked.”
Although Nixon can be heard on the tapes admitting that he felt marijuana penalties were too harsh, he also made clear he didn’t support fully legalizing it.
“But we are not for legalization, I don’t want to encourage the drug thing,” he said in one recording. “We’re starting to win the fight against drugs. This is not a time to let down the bars. and to encourage, basically, people to break open the discussion into the drug culture.”
Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, later conceded that the president’s insistence on criminalizing people over drugs was part of a political ploy to undermine “the anti-war left and Black people.”
“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,” Ehrlichman said in a 1994 interview that was published by Harper’s in 2016. “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.”
Former President Richard Nixon, despite declaring the war on drugs and rejecting a federal commission’s recommendation to decriminalize marijuana, admitted in a newly unearthed recording that he knew cannabis is “not particularly dangerous.” “Let me say, I know nothing about marijuana,” Nixon said in a March 1973 White House meeting. “I know that it’s not Read More