Snow Ghosts and Marijuana Fairytales: How Reagan’s Americans Embraced the War on Drugs

“Growing up, I remember politicians hopping on TV to talk about how they would save the cities from the ‘menace’ of drug traffickers. It was the age of the ‘super predator’ and we were all supposed to be grateful for leaders who prioritized law and order. But I didn’t know any super predators.”

— Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes From The Women That A Movement Forgot

Before Nixon and Reagan’s war on drugs from the telly was Harry J. Anslinger’s announcement on the radio, telling Americans that they should “beware!” of marijuana, and telling parents that the youth are increasingly “…continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally… and turn to violent crime and murder.” Anslinger was the “drug czar” of his time, and was appointed first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) in 1930 by President Herbert Hoover, which was the precursor of the DEA. His efforts to incite panic in the American population about the effects of drugs and to shut down medical experts made him the father of American drug policy.

His impact never left the country’s policies. On June 17th, 1971, Richard Nixon first introduced to the Washington Press Corps the urgent need for a war on drugs, making “this statement, which I think needs to be made to the Nation: America’s public enemy number one … is drug abuse. … It is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.” This was primarily supplemented by the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Eleven years later, on October 14th, 1982, President Ronald Reagan, in an address to the nation from the Great Hall at the Department of Justice, declared there to be an “emergence of a new privileged class in America, a class ofrepeat offenders and career criminals … the result of misplaced government priorities and a misguided social philosophy. … This philosophy suggests in short that there is crime or wrongdoing, and that society, not the individual, is to blame.”

This declaration was backed by his eight-point-plan, which included unleashing 12 task forces to suppress organized involvement in drug abuse, “including the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, the ATF, Immigration and Naturalization Service, United States Marshals Services, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Coast Guard,” as well as the creation of a center for training local law enforcement in combating drug smuggling and other syndicated crime, and the allotment of millions of dollars to prisons and jails for their expansion.

The War on Drugs is the usage of greater punishment and legal enforcement against drug use in the United States. The greater rise of the War came in tandem with the rise of President Reagan’s Neoliberal policies (“Reaganomics”) that pushed off from New Deal Liberalism, which included tax cuts, diminishing market regulation, and allowing for free trade, as well as low social welfare spending. Such policies fall under one principal theme: minimal government accountability for the benefit of American communities. Instead of Reagan himself, the visibility of the War shifted to TV programs and sensationalistic news stories. The Reagan era (1981-1989) War on Drugs shattered communities using ‘attack’ policies and media propaganda to create a cultural frenzy of fear of drugs and drug users. What could have been an attack on addiction was instead a war on people; war, in any form, of course, does nothing but cast a long-lasting, haunting specter over a country.

Harry Anslinger’s Marijuana Fairytales

Harry Anslinger’s descriptions of Communist Chinese men luring white women into their ‘opium dens’ led to official raids on Chinese communities. Newspaper tales of the special potential violence of black Americans on cocaine— while Anslinger stressed that black Americans already made up ‘60 percent of the addicts’— had Southern police increasing the caliber of their guns. The violence enacted against people of color was not a side effect– the point of the aggression was about putting them in their place, lest they, to Anslinger’s imagination, got too excited on dope and cocaine and infiltrated or violated white society. George White, Anslinger’s favorite agent from the FBN, complained about Billie Holiday’s “fancy coats and fancy automobiles and her jewelry and her gown,” before seemingly planting a heroin kit and opium in her hotel room in San Francisco. Holiday got charged with possession, but upon interrogation from journalists about the unlikely location of the stash (a wastepaper basket), White could only stammer.

Anslinger did not come across such egregious falsehoods about narcotics and marijuana from unintentional ignorance. He did not believe marijuana to be a major issue until he began to envision Mexican Americans and African Americans, gorged on drugs, laying hands on naive white girls. He then inquired about the effects of marijuana to thirty scientific experts. All thirty wrote back. Only one called to ban it, which was the only confirmation he needed. He continued to proclaim to the public stories of marijuana turning normal citizens into crazed killers. Doctors came to him with evidence that, perhaps, marijuana made one sleepy at most, or that it was not an inherently evil substance in general, and in return, Anslinger refused to ever fund independent scientific research.

When Edward Huntington Williams, a doctor who was a leading expert on opioids, and an extremely highly regarded expert in medicine, opened a free clinic to prescribe drugs to addicts, he was only following tradition before the reign of Anslinger. Local pharmacists, at low prices, sold remedies with morphine and heroin as casually as those today might sell sugary cough syrups. Regular users would carry on working and raising their families, even among the ones who got hooked. Once the crackdown on narcotics administered by doctors began, he saw “tens of thousands of people, in every walk of life, frantically craving drugs that they could in no legal way secure… must have known that their Edict, if enforced, was the clear equivalent of an order to create an illicit drug industry.” But he would soon be destroyed by Anslinger’s second poison, if the first one was media weaponization, and the second was unleashing his zealous agents onto civilian territory. A decoy addict stumbled into his clinic, and Williams, having no reason to fear a consequence, wrote him a prescription of heroin to get him back to normal. He would become one of twenty thousand doctors busted by police, and his life work became obsolete. These ‘poisons’ would remain the main two weapons decades in the future.

This was the basis of the Drug War— Anslinger’s fear isolated every drug user from their supply, artificially creating a drug problem as people no longer had a way to get a safe supply. What were the long term implications? Just as the prohibition-era Mafia sold alcohol because of the market placed directly in their hands, drug peddlers and cartels now had something that people wanted badly.

Reagan’s Imagination and the American Culture Dish

Ronald Reagan, even during his time only as a Hollywood actor, expressed, in a 1957 speech at his alma mater, Eureka College, dismay over Americans, under New Deal regulated Liberalism, being crushed “into a mold of standardized mediocrity,” as there was a seemingly economic minimum and maximum a person could be a part of. In Reagan’s mind was the vague, glamorous and heroic age of capitalism, where “American pioneers” risked their own souls in the market and could either fall into poverty, or be launched into prosperity, based all on their hard work.

During his presidency, he pointedly avoided enacting policies which could have built off of 1960s-era domestic policies (such as Medicaid and Affirmative Action) by not addressing poor housing conditions, failing education systems, and unemployment. Instead, under the Reagan administration, half a million families were stricken from the welfare eligibility, one million people from food stamps, over two-and-a-half million children from school lunch programs; he introduced nine block grants in 1982, reducing the money the federal government could allot to the states and, in general, central government accountability — inflation increased, for the government turned a blind eye, and Americans got poorer.

Famously, in the years leading up to his presidency, before losing his presidential nomination to Gerald Ford, Reagan painted the picture of the morally corrupt Linda Taylor, who would come to use “eighty names, thirty addresses, fifteen telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four non-existent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare,” opening the floodgates to a barrage of media coverage on welfare and Medicaid cheats, as Reagan himself bemoaned the apparently fraud-ridden system. “Only our deep moral values and strong institutions can … restrain the darker impulses of human nature,” Reagan told the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1981. In early January of 1967, in his Inaugural Address as Governor of California, he called welfare money an inhuman destruction of “self-reliance, dignity, and self-respect,” and the maker of continued poverty. He quoted Benjamin Disraeli, a mid-19th century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, with “[m]an is not a creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” This statement would be followed by his formerly noted lack of ‘circumstance’ shifting for poverty, only attacking the symptom of poverty, which is, of course, the welfare system.

The anti-welfare panic among Americans (84 percent of Illinois voters considered welfare a prominent concern in 1978) neatly set up the culture that would lead to another kind of moral outrage.

The Television and Cop Love Affair

Children in school in the U.S. would learn to become familiar with the state mandated, seemingly benign, and all important message to “Just Say No!” to drugs, with First Lady Nancy Reagan’s face at the forefront of it all in talk shows and television news programs. This was one key strategy of the Reagan administration’s crackdown: with the assertion blazing across TV programs (notably Diff’rent Strokes (1978) and Punky Brewster (1984)), covers of arcade games, and other widespread educational programs to say no to drug use, Americans were sure to get the message that the drug issue was the issue caused by the irresponsible and the demoralized; that is, because too few people were saying ‘no.’

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander notes that in August of 1986, Time magazine called crack the “issue of the year,” and the thousands of crack stories that featured black faces represented these crack users in various headlines and stories. With Linda Taylor already the face of the corrupt and lazy ‘welfare queen,’ the crack sensation only solidified placing black communities and people as the target of the war. Politicians from both parties were pushed to be ‘tough on crime’ in policy. It became the universal, unquestioned stance. Who would be against preventing American children from getting drugged up by the dregs of society?

The media and the police were becoming increasingly intertwined. Cracked Coverage by Jimmie Lynn Reeves brought forth the imagery of TV cameras doggedly following cops as they bust into houses for their drug raids. Geraldo Rivera, an American political commentator, had a 1986 program called “American Vice: The Doping of a Nation” which included clips of real police drug raids. A Time article commented that “antics of Rivera’s show highlighted concerns about the increasingly common practice of letting TV crews tag along on drug raids.” The citizen exploitation by broadcasting images of their wrongdoing and downfall was an important aspect to how the War invaded the American psyche. Rivera’s show echoed Miami Vice, a popular adventure cop show of the time, by name, attaching an embarrassment of drama to what should have been a dull crime. The program was controversial, but the sensationalism it indulged in was not new in the journalism world. In the 1991 study “Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources” by Richard Ericson, Patricia Baranek, and Janet Chan, the extent to which the media became not just a puppet of the militarization of the War, but working right alongside the police was commented on:

The police have come to appreciate that the news media are part of the policing apparatus of society, and can be controlled and put to good use in this respect. The news media are incorporated into the architecture of new police buildings (they are given newsroom facilities there), they are taken into account in police organizational charts, they are subject to the regulations in police operation manuals, and they are part of everyday practice at all levels of the police hierarchy.

What made the Reagan era of the War unique was this, then; the transition from the image of a mere public crime crisis in certain (urban) areas to being a scandalous specter— white powder that could coat even the neighborhoods of suburban middle America. Had the issue remained the first, it would have been ignorable to many, a problem that merely plagued the unfortunate peoples in impoverished parts of the city.

It was not just crack stories hitting the news seemingly each day that defined the uniquely severe push of the Reagan Era’s War, but of course, Nancy’s Just Say No campaign that allowed her to transform into an American figure of benevolence. Drugs were a product of a kind of unnatural urban hell that could ‘infiltrate’ neighborhoods through malevolent or ignorant outsiders, and suburban American neighborhoods self-fortifying against this threat, creating self-contained communities which emphasized nuclear family values, became another key Reaganist idea. The “community mobilization” of these neighborhoods took the form of a “society of informers.” Christina J. Johns, in “Power, Ideology, and the War on Drugs: Nothing Succeeds Like Failure,” notes the “relish” in which society began turning in those within their communities: “In a poll conducted by the Washington Post/ABC News in 1989, 83 percent of the respondents favored encouraging people to phone the police to report drug users even if it meant turning in ‘a family member who uses drugs.’” This extended into schools. The Drug Awareness Resistance Education (DARE) program, as administered by the LAPD, and founded in 1984, planted uniformed police officers in classrooms to tell children to “Just say no,” and additionally to tell on their peers who might be saying ‘yes.’ ‘DARE Boxes’ were installed in some classrooms where the students could act on DARE’s Three R’s— “Recognize, Resist, and Report”— and put in the name of a suspected drug-using peer. This, alongside the police hotlines placed everywhere, boosted by local news organizations, created an environment of total fear and lack of trust. What were the effects on children from uniformed men knocking down doors on screen as national heroes dragging out the undesirables of society, and those same men coming to their schools to teach them that some of their own peers and even parents could be one of them if they were not careful enough?

Reaganist Policies

Before the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which codified criminal penalties for possession of a controlled substance, increased penalties for minors in a drug business, and the expansion of mandatory minimum penalties, there was the 1984 Comprehensive Crime control Act of 1984, which established those mandatory minimum sentences. That same year, the DEA launched Operation Pipeline, based on drug traffickers’ usage of U.S. highways to move their wares around. This is a federal program that mainly trains officers specifically to use pretextual and ‘consent’ searches on the road for mass seizure of drugs and arresting of those possessing drugs in their vehicles. Of course, those most really affected by the “war” were never large scale distributors or kingpins. Four out of five drug arrests were for mere possession, and the other fifth were for selling.

During Reagan’s second term, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was launched. It doubled the level of money already given to domestic crime and drug restraint initiatives during his first term, and tripled drug enforcement funds. While Reagan’s speech on it seemed to emphasize drug treatment and education, “the $900 million allocated by Congress for drug abuse programs … went mostly for the purchase of helicopters, airplanes, and intelligence-gathering facilities.”

It is true that some attention was given to schools, however, as the Drug Policy Board facilitated drug testing sites in workplaces and rescinded federal student loans if the student was convicted of a drug offense (which included simple drug use).

The aim of the game under Reagan’s rule was less government accountability, which was achieved by the false utopian racial ideal America had convinced itself of embodying: color-blindness. Reagan himself commemorated Martin Luther King Jr.’s judge-not-by-color-of-skin line, and then commemorated his upholding of the ideal, citing record amounts of black Americans holding jobs in 1984. Of course, claiming colorblindness in a society and individualizing the drug issue, as the Reagan Administration did, erased the need to address impoverished conditions that might lead to crime to increase the possibilities of literal survival, and also erased the need to examine possible racial profiling and otherwise unfairly motivated officers (such as by property and money seizures and federal funding that came from each drug user caught).

Conclusion

What was left in the United States was a culture of baseless individualization and the gross entanglement of the media and police organizations. The isolation of drug users and sensationalized cocaine and weed use continued and perpetuated a legacy from the 1930s, and was exacerbated by bringing cops into people’s homes and schools, creating a state of fear and discord within American communities: the War on Drugs being a war in this way doomed its goal of a better America from the start. What’s the alternative? Anyone today can see that the ideas fabricated during the 1930’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s are still often considered ‘common sense.’ People know about the big cartels, imagining waterfalls of pills pouring into the country, and into the hands of middle-market sellers. They know that they land in the hands of drug retailers haunting the shadows of the neighborhoods they know to drive quicker through. They shall advise children to ‘just say no,’ of course.

They are not wrong. But it is a shallow perspective, one that is still unchallenged in our higher offices, by politicians who know it is generally advisable to declare toughness on crime and ‘clean the streets.’ The philosophy— if one could call it that— from decades ago is as strong as ever. Those who wish to reject the common pessimism will talk about improving living conditions: wages, access to food, home life, even. While the quality of life is nearly without exception a major consideration to make when analyzing any shade of societal ‘bad behavior,’ it would be shrewder to remember how life was before any of this ever began: back in the early nineteenth century, when drug use was nowhere near as pathological, and therefore almost never life-ruining. Instead of rehabilitation centers running on the attitude of tough love at best, which remove any source of comfort in an effort to bring addicts back to reality, cities should consider opening drug clinics for those who cannot function in their life properly any longer, and let them receive doses as they wish, so they a) do not have to act destructively to themselves or people around them in order to obtain the drugs and b) can self regulate to low doses once more. People do not have to be alone and rejected from their communities, indeed, the thing most important for a human being to be a part of.

Bibliography

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow.

The Alliance for Citizen Engagement. Last modified May 26, 2022. https://ace-usa.org/blog/research/research-criminaljustice/a-brief-history-of-the-war-on-dr ugs/#:~:text=President%20Reagan%27s%20administration%20also%20passed,violent% 20and%20non%2Dviolent%20crimes.

Blanchard, Olivier Jean, William Branson, and David Currie. “Reaganomics.” Economic Policy 2, no. 5 (1987). JSTOR.

Drug Enforcement Administration. “The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) 1980-1985.” N.d. Digital file.

Gerstle, Gary. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. Digital file.

Hari, Johann. Chasing the Scream. N.p.: Bloomsbury Publishing, n.d.

Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. N.p., 2016.

“H.R.5484 – 99th Congress (1985-1986): Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.” Congress.gov. https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-bill/5484.

Kilgore, James. Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time.

Lybarger, Jeremy. “The Price You Pay.” The Nation. Last modified July 2, 2019. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/josh-levin-the-queen-book-review/.

“Radio Address to the Nation on Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black Americans,” The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/radio-address-the-nation-martin-luther-king- jr-and-black-americans.

“Remarks About an Intensified Program for Drug Abuse Prevention and Control.” The American Presidency Project. Last modified June 17, 1971. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-about-intensified-program-for-drug -abuse-prevention-and-control.

“Remarks Announcing Federal Initiatives Against Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime.” The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Last modified October 14, 1982. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-announcing-federal-initiatives-ag ainst-drug-trafficking-and-organized-crime.

Souza, Lawrence, and Jacob Dunbar. “Review of: THE SCOURGE OF NEOLIBERALISM by JACK RASMUS.” World Review of Political Economy, 13, no. 4 (2022). JSTOR.

---