The War on Drugs — From Mandatory Minimums to Mass Incarceration
From the Boggs Act to three-strikes. The counterculture, Nixon's tapes, Ehrlichman's confession, Reagan's escalation, and the largest expansion of incarceration in the democratic world's history.
The War on Drugs was not a public-health response to a public-health problem. It was, in the words of Nixon's own domestic policy chief, a counterinsurgency against domestic political enemies dressed as drug policy. The men who built it said so on tape. The data — 6.1 million marijuana arrests in eight years, Black Americans arrested at 3.64 times the rate of whites — confirm what they said.
This section documents the war: its legislative architecture, its cultural context, the movements that opposed it, and the human lives it consumed.
The chapters
Mandatory Minimums
The Boggs Act (1951) and Daniel Act (1956) tied marijuana to heroin in sentencing. Two to five years for a first offense. Anslinger reversed his own position to push them through.
Read →The Counterculture
Ginsberg's Howl, LeMar, Leary v. United States, the Summer of Love, the Grateful Dead arrested at 710 Ashbury. Cannabis as the soundtrack of a generation.
Read →NORML
Keith Stroup, $5,000 from Playboy, "decriminalization" not "legalization," eleven states, the Carter White House — then the Peter Bourne scandal destroyed it all.
Read →Nixon
The Controlled Substances Act, Schedule I as "temporary," the Shafer Commission buried, the tapes: "every one of the bastards is Jewish." And Ehrlichman: "Of course we did."
Read →Robert Randall
The first medical-necessity defense. A glaucoma patient forced the federal government to provide the drug it insisted had no medical use. Four patients still receive it.
Read →Reagan & DARE
Len Bias, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, 100:1 crack disparity, "Just Say No," and DARE — the program every meta-analysis found did not work.
Read →Mass Incarceration
500,000 prisoners in 1980, 2.3 million by 2008. The ACLU data, the racial disparity, three-strikes laws, and life sentences for cannabis.
Read →Cannabis Prisoners
Richard DeLisi: 31 years. Weldon Angelos: 55-year sentence for $350. Michael Thompson: 25 years for three pounds. The judge who resigned from the bench.
Read →Eradication
CAMP helicopters over the Emerald Triangle. US-funded paraquat spraying. And how the eradication campaigns built the genetics of the legal industry.
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