Former President Richard Nixon, who launched the War on Drugs in 1971 that has repercussions to this day, admitted that he knew marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.”
His confession was recorded during a meeting with a group of White House aides in March 1973, via his secret recording system. It was only recently made available after a cannabis industry lobbyist found the conversation while listening through hours of tapes, The New York Times Reports.
“Let me say I don’t know anything about marijuana,” he said. “I know it’s not particularly dangerous, and in other words, most kids are in favor of legalizing it. But on the other hand, this is the wrong signal at this time.”
Although he publicly claimed that drug use was “public enemy number one,” he privately questioned during the meeting the harsh penalties Americans face for marijuana offenses. “The penalties have to fit the crime,” Nixon said during the Oval Office conversation, referring to a 30-year prison sentence in a cannabis case he had recently learned of. “The penalties are ridiculous.”
“I have no problem with there being a penalty assessment for this, and there shouldn’t be penalties like the ones in Texas where people get 10 years in prison for marijuana. That’s wrong,” Nixon said.
Despite Nixon’s reluctance to criminalize marijuana, he established the federal drug classification system, classifying marijuana among substances believed to be most abused and with no proven medical value. Since then, its classification has led to disproportionately high rates of incarceration, disproportionately affecting black people, who are 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, according to an analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union. Nixon’s decision has also hampered progress in research into marijuana’s therapeutic potential over the past five decades.
Nixon’s newly discovered remarks come as the federal government reconsiders whether to classify marijuana as a Schedule I drug, which includes heroin and LSD. In May, the Justice Department said the attorney general was considering “a proposal to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III.” The Drug Enforcement Agency has scheduled a public hearing after the presidential election, on Dec. 2, to consider various views on the proposal.
Meanwhile, the major presidential candidates appeared to be calling for loosening marijuana policies. In an interview with Rolling Stone In an article published in June, before Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, the vice president discussed her comments that marijuana should not be a Schedule I drug. “I upset some people when I made a public statement, ‘Can we move forward with this? Can we do the analysis like this?’” [drug] “Timeline. Move it. Change it.”
Despite appointing a group of anti-marijuana advocates to his cabinet, Donald Trump acknowledged last month that a vote on a bill to legalize recreational marijuana in Florida seemed inevitable. Without endorsing it, he suggested he favored decriminalizing marijuana. “No one should be a felon in Florida when it is legal in so many other states,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform, via Twitter. The Times“We don’t need to ruin people’s lives and waste taxpayer dollars arresting adults with personal drug possession, and no one should have to grieve for a loved one who died from fentanyl-laced marijuana.”
