President Richard M. Nixon was a man with enemies. So many enemies, in fact, that he had to make several lists to keep track of them all...
President Richard M. Nixon was also a man with a plan, a man willing and able to use any means necessary to defeat those he saw as opponents, to "use the available federal machinery to screw [his] political enemies," in the words of former White House Counsel John Dean (one of the key figures in the Watergate cover-up). In the instance of the individuals on the so-called "Enemies List," Nixon sought to wield the tax audit as a weapon, making the IRS his personal Praetorian Guard. (This effort was foiled when the IRS Director refused to comply.)
On June 18, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, the man with enemies everywhere, addressed the assembled media and declared drug abuse to be "public enemy number one."
In October of the previous year, Congress had passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act at the President's urging. Title II of this act, the Controlled Substances Act, created the "schedule" system whereby government officials would regulate the status of various drugs. This act also served as the mechanism for the fulfillment of the United States' treaty obligations as signers of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and stipulated that the Federal drug authorities enforce to the furthest possible extent the "scheduling" decisions of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the World Health Organization, the bodies tasked with making such determinations under the treaty.
Thus, in one fell swoop, the task of regulating drugs and determining their legality or illegality was not only taken out of the hands of Congress (and thus of the American people) and put into the hands of unelected Federal bureaucrats; it was also taken out of the hands of American bureaucrats and put into the hands of unelected bureaucrats of other nations! (If you hear the Founding Fathers cursing from their graves as you read that last sentence, don't worry: I hear it, too.)
President Nixon was not satisfied that enough had been done, however. In 1971 he would make the above declaration about "public enemy number one," also referring to drug abuse as a "national emergency," and pushing for more anti-drug legislation. The government's drug enforcement budget would soar, going from $3 million in 1968 to $224 million in 1974; among the package of bills that would be passed were provisions allowing for the use of "no-knock" raids. Although these "no-knock" raids technically required warrants, very few warrant requests were ever refused (judges not wanting to appear "soft on crime," naturally), and every case to reach the Supreme Court has been approved, thus eviscerating the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure. [Since then, courts have ruled that police can: acquire evidence despite invalid warrants, so long as they act "in good faith;" rummage through our garbage cans; conduct helicopter surveillance of homes and property; stop citizens in their cars or in other public places for questioning and demand that they submit to being sniffed by drug dogs; open first class mail; and stop boats on the water and travelers near the border without any suspicion whatsoever...]
In 1973, Nixon would establish the Drug Enforcement Administration within the Department of Justice to oversee Federal drug enforcement. This agency would be given the "emergency" authority to "schedule" drugs in addition to the FDA and Department of Health and Human Services, ostensibly to allow for flexibility in fighting new street drugs that have not yet been evaluated. Critics have charged, however, that the DEA acts as little more than the strong arm of the pharmaceutical industry, restrictively scheduling any recreationally-used drug that the industry is not controlling, while leaving legal many industry-created drugs that have proven dangerously addictive and deadly. While this theory is a point of debate, what is not debatable is that the DEA has essentially been given carte blanche to schedule drugs as it sees fit, often employs violent means to achieve its goals (having murdered United States citizens on multiple occasions), and has been mired in numerous scandals of corruption and incompetence...
What does all of this have to do with Nixon's enemies list, you ask? Well, some enemies are not individuals. Some enemies are movements, ideals, and ideas; some enemies are entire segments of the population.
How does one defeat these enemies? You can't order tax audits of ideas; you can't threaten or harass entire segments of the population. What's a man like Nixon to do, just let these "enemies" get off scot-free? Allow them to continue undermining his authority and vision for the nation with impunity? Of course not. A man like Nixon does what men like Nixon have always done: win at all costs. Anathematize his enemies; vilify them; find his enemies' weaknesses and figure out a way to exploit them.
So who were these enemies he so feared and loathed that he was willing to trash the Constitution to defeat them? They were large segments of the American people that he, as President, was supposed to be serving: black people, who had shifted to the Democratic Party after LBJ supported civil rights legislation and Barry Goldwater rejected it, and members of the New Left: hippies and young people who were against the war in Vietnam (and mostly thought Nixon was the devil.)
How did President Nixon decide to disrupt these groups and communities? Simple: the War on Drugs. As Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman said in 1994 in an interview in Harper's:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? 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, ant then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. 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."
And there we have it. President Richard M. Nixon effectively declared war against his own people and their Constitutional rights that he was sworn to defend.
Stay tuned for The Drug War and Police Brutality, Part Three: Crack in the Foundation
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