Nixon Caught On Tape Downplaying Dangers of Pot

Ehrlichman and Nixon

"Nixon Started the War on Drugs. Privately, He Said Pot Was ‘Not Particularly Dangerous,’" read a startling New York Times headline last week.

Minnesota cannabis lobbyist Kurtis Hanna was responsible for the story, after he listened to hours Nixon's infamous Oval Office tapes recently uploaded by the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Hanna told the Times he has been "fascinated by the history of drug policy ever since he was arrested inside a casino in Iowa in 2009 and charged with possession of marijuana."

“Let me say, I know nothing about marijuana. I know that it’s not particularly dangerous, in other words, and most of the kids are for legalizing it," Nixon said in a March 1973 White House meeting with aides including then–White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler and White House counsel/Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman.

Nixon added, "I don't think marijuana is (unintelligible) bad, but on the other hand, it’s the wrong signal at this time." He then began to talk about a coming law enforcement speech in which he would "totally" oppose legalization, bragging that no administration had been as hard-line on the issue, and opening a discussion about mandatory minimum sentences; penalties like five years for a trafficker, and life without parole for repeated offenses were put on the table.

The discussion happened two years after Nixon ignited the War on Drugs by declaring drug abuse "Public Enemy Number One" and signing the law that put marijuana into the most restrictive federal Schedule I designation under the purview of the Drug Enforcement Administration he had created by administrative action. Nixon ignored the 1972 findings of the Blue-Ribbon Shafer Commission he had appointed, which recommended decriminalizing marijuana possession. 

Discussing drug use in the nation, Nixon opined in the newly discovered tape, "If you could get them off of heroin and onto marijuana, it would be a good thing." He added, “The penalties should be commensurate with the crime,” mentioning a cannabis case he recently heard about where a father turned in his own son not knowing the penalty, which was “ridiculous.” He talked about tobacco and other legal substances being perhaps more dangerous than marijuana. Still, he maintained, "We're starting to win the War on Drugs; this is not a time to let down the bars."

“Jack Herer declared in 1973, ‘The Emperor Wears No Clothes,’ in his book by the same name,” Hanna told Marijuana Moment. “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.”

Herer once told Dale Gieringer of California NORML that he had a friend who worked for the Orange County Republican party. After Nixon retired to San Clemente, the friend had an opportunity to chat with him. Nixon reportedly mused, "I don't understand why marijuana isn't legal by now." Asked, "Why, didn't you refuse to decriminalize it?" Nixon responded, "Yeah, but that was politics. I couldn't do it then. I thought it would be legal by now."

In 2016, Harper’s magazine published an article by Dan Baum that included excerpts from a 1994 interview with Ehrlichman, who was quoted saying that the Nixon administration intentionally misled the public about the danger of drugs to undermine some of its main opponents: Black activists and groups opposed to the Vietnam War.

“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, according to the Harper’s story. The comments were left out of the book Baum subsequently published, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. Ehrlichman died in 1999 and Baum in 2020.

In another previously-reported-on White House tape, Nixon strangely observed to his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman on May 26, 1971, "You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists." As revealed by Boston Globe writer Dan Abrams, Nixon had been briefed that morning on the book Marihuana Reconsidered by Jewish psychiatrist Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard professor. The landmark book "helped launch the contemporary movement to legalize the drug, lending Ivy League credibility to a cause more associated with hippie counterculture than serious medical research," wrote Abrams. 

Grinspoon's son Dr. Peter Grinspoon has carried on his father's work as a cannabis expert who teaches at Harvard Medical School. He has the last word in the Times article on the newly uncovered tapes, lamenting that "the Nixon era policy meant that for years the government mainly funded studies looking into marijuana’s dangers and showed little interest in its medicinal value. That has begun to change as experts have come to see cannabis as a promising tool to treat opioid addiction, side effects from cancer treatments and chronic pain."

“The opportunity cost of the policies of that era,” Grinspoon said, “has been tremendous."

The cost of the 50-plus year War on Drugs to those imprisoned and their families and communities is incalculable. In the case of marijuana, those costs came despite the architect of the WOD knowing pot wasn't so dangerous. We might get rescheduling down to Schedule 3 for cannabis sometime in the future; meanwhile the Last Prisoner Project is pushing for our sitting president to do something meaningful about the estimated 3,000 currently imprisoned for cannabis offenses in their #Countdown4Clemency campaign.