17 June 1971: USA declares ‘War on Drugs’

On this day in 1971, Richard Nixon announced that the USA would wage a ‘war on drugs’, which he named as ‘public enemy number one’.

Ben Judge
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published
in Features

150617-richard-nixon

US president Richard Nixon declared drugs 'public enemy number one'

The 1960s was a time of mind expansion, free love and tiresomely earnest discussions about the nature of the universe all fuelled by drugs, man.

But The Man wasn't having it. Less thantwo years after the Sixties finally shut up and went to bed, Richard Nixon declared on this day in 1971 that he was going to wage a war on drugs'.

It wasn't so much the hippies that got up Tricky Dicky's nose, it was more the fact that GIs in Vietnam were getting hooked on extremely powerful narcotics, which wasn't doing much for the war effort.

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The sensible solution might have been to pull out of Vietnam and give some serious counselling to the traumatised young fighters. But when it comes to drugs, sensible rarely enters into the conversation.

Drugs were named public enemy number one', and the USA led the world in throwing money and legislation at the problem, seemingly having learned nothing from its disastrous experiment with prohibiting alcohol.

As with most wars, it wasn't going to be cheap either in monetary terms, or the number of lives lost or ruined. And with the global drugs trade worth £435bn a year, it was facing a formidable foe.

Since Nixon's speech, the USA has spent over $1trn in fighting drugs. A quarter of the people in jail in the US some half a million people are there because of drugs offences, and $41bn a year is spent on enforcing America's drugs laws, according to CNN.

But if currently illegal drugs were to be taxed on the same basis as tobacco and alcohol, it's estimated that the country could raise nearly $50bn a year. Indeed, Colorado, which legalised the sale of cannabis for recreational use in January 2014, raked in over$91m in taxes and fees in the year to the end of April 2015.And in the year to April 2016, that figure has risen to over $142m.

Ben Judge
Ben Judge

Ben studied modern languages at London University's Queen Mary College. After dabbling unhappily in local government finance for a while, he went to work for The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh. The launch of the paper's website, scotsman.com, in the early years of the dotcom craze, saw Ben move online to manage the Business and Motors channels before becoming deputy editor with responsibility for all aspects of online production for The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and the Edinburgh Evening News websites, along with the papers' Edinburgh Festivals website.

Ben joined MoneyWeek as website editor in 2008, just as the Great Financial Crisis was brewing. He has written extensively for the website and magazine, with a particular emphasis on alternative finance and fintech, including blockchain and bitcoin. 

As an early adopter of bitcoin, Ben bought when the price was under $200, but went on to spend it all on foolish fripperies.

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