Reagan War On Drugs Quotes

Although crack cocaine had not yet hit the streets when the War on Drugs was declared in 1982, its appearance a few years later created the perfect opportunity for the Reagan administration to build support for its new war. Drug use, once considered a private, public-health matter, was reframed through political rhetoric and media imagery as a grave threat to the national order.

In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined.

I thanked Nancy for what she had accomplished in her war against illegal drugs, but in my heart, I was really trying to say, “Thank you, Nancy, for everything; thank you for lighting up my life for almost forty years.

Turner [Reagan's "drug czar'] was especially determined to purge psychiatrists from federal drug agencies. "They're trained to treat," he said, "and treatment isn't what we do." Methadone was out, so Turner blocked advocates of the treatment who were still in the federal government from speaking about it publicly.

President Reagan officially announced his administration's War on Drugs. At the time...less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation. This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race.

The War on Drugs will go down in history as the most racist crusade since slavery.

Reagan’s Drugs Czar, Carlton Turner, said that kids deserved to die as a punishment for smoking poisoned weed, to teach them a lesson. Two years later, he called for the death penalty for all drug users. On

As if the free military equipment, training, and cash grants were not enough, the Reagan administration provided law enforcement with yet another financial incentive to devote extraordinary resources to drug law enforcement, rather than more serious crimes: state and local law enforcement agencies were granted the authority to keep, for their own use, the vast majority of cash and assets they seize when waging the drug war. This dramatic change in policy gave state and local police an enormous stake in the War on Drugs - not in its success, but in its perpetual existence. Law enforcement gained a pecuniary interest not only in the forfeited property, but in the profitability of the drug market itself.

Republicans remained purely about small government until they started their unlawful and unnecessary wars. The first was Nixon’s and later Reagan’s and Bush’s War on Drugs, and the second was George W. Bush’s War on Terror. These wars enlarged government, increased spending, enhanced regulation, took away the rights of the American people, and were largely ineffective.

In reality, a few years later a North–South compact permitted the slaveholding states to reinstitute a form of slavery by effectively criminalizing black life, providing a cheap and disciplined labor force for much of the industrial revolution, a system that persisted until World War II created the need for free labor. The ugly history is being reenacted under the vicious “drug war” of the past generation, since Ronald Reagan.

In October 1982, President Reagan officially announced his administration’s War on Drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation.72 This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined “others”—the undeserving. Practically overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million.73 Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. During that same period, DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 to $1,026 million, and FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million.74 By contrast, funding for agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention, and education was dramatically reduced. The budget of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for example, was reduced from $274 million to $57 million from 1981 to 1984, and antidrug funds allocated to the Department of Education were cut from $14 million to $3 million.75

Reagan's promise to enhance the federal government's role in fighting crime was complicated by the fact that fighting street crime has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local law enforcement. After a period of initial confusion and controversy...the Justice Department announced its intention to cut in half the number of specialists assigned to identify and prosecute white collar criminals and to shift its attention to street crime, especially drug-law enforcement.

Congress would later find that though bureau officials undertook COINTELPRO in the name of national security, its purpose was “preventing or disrupting the exercise of First Amendment rights.” The program took tactics developed for use against foreign adversaries during war and applied them to citizens: leaking phony allegations, sending anonymous poison-pen letters, interfering with jobs, having people arrested on drug charges, distributing misinformation, and encouraging violence. “In essence, the Bureau took the law into its own hands, conducting a sophisticated vigilante operation against domestic enemies,” the committee said. “Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that. The unexpressed major premise of the programs was a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.

The transformation from "community policing" to "military policing," began in 1981, when President Reagan persuaded Congress to pass the Military Cooperation Law Enforcement Act, which encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, intelligence, research, weaponry, and other equipment for drug interdiction. That legislation carved a huge exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, the Civil War--era law prohibiting the use of the Military for civilian policing.

This view, while understandable, given the sensational media coverage of crack in the 1980s and 1990s, is simply wrong. While it is true that the publicity surrounding crack cocaine led to a dramatic increase in funding for the drug war (as well as to sentencing policies that greatly exacerbated racial disparities in incarceration rates), there is no truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in response to crack cocaine. President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.2 The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war.

Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, has written an entire book, The New Jim Crow, that blames high black incarceration rates on racial discrimination. She posits that prisons are teeming with young black men due primarily to a war on drugs that was launched by the Reagan administration in the 1980s for the express purpose of resegregating society. “This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system,” wrote Alexander.4 “What this book is intended to do—the only thing it is intended to do—is to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetrating racial hierarchy in the United States.”5 Liberals love to have “conversations” about these matters, and Alexander got her wish. The book was a best seller. NPR interviewed her multiple times at length. The New York Times said that Alexander “deserved to be compared to Du Bois.” The San Francisco Chronicle described the book as “The Bible of a social movement.

The War on Drugs was declared as part of a political ploy to capitalize on white racial resentment against African Americans, and the Reagan administration used the emergence of crack and its related violence as an opportunity to build a racialized public consensus in support of an all-out war—a consensus that almost certainly would not have been formed if the primary users and dealers of crack had been white.

Perhaps the best known of these training programs is Operation Pipeline. The DEA launched Operation Pipeline in 1984 as part of the Reagan administration’s rollout of the War on Drugs. The federal program, administered by over three hundred state and local law enforcement agencies, trains state and local law enforcement officers to use pretextual traffic stops and consent searches on a large scale for drug interdiction. Officers learn, among other things, how to use a minor traffic violation as a pretext to stop someone, how to lengthen a routine traffic stop and leverage it into a search for drugs, how to obtain consent from a reluctant motorist, and how to use drug-sniffing dogs to obtain probable cause.23 By 2000, the DEA had directly trained more than 25,000 officers in forty-eight states in Pipeline tactics and helped to develop training programs for countless municipal and state law enforcement agencies.

On October 14, 1982, less than a month before Republicans would suffer an embarrassing showing in the midterm elections, Reagan declared a new front in the war on drugs—establishing a dozen task forces under the direction of the attorney general “to mount an intensive and coordinated campaign against international and domestic drug trafficking and other organized criminal enterprises.” But three years later, Reagan called the Contras, who were seeking to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, “our brothers” and “freedom fighters” who were “more equal of our Founding Fathers.” They were also, as National Security Council Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North knew, protecting traffickers and running cocaine themselves. “We permitted narcotics,” then-U.S. senator John Kerry said at a 1988 subcommittee hearing on drugs, terrorism, and international operations. “We were complicitous as a country in narcotics traffic at the same time as we’re spending countless dollars in this country to try to get rid of this problem. It’s mind-boggling.” “I don’t know if we’ve got the worst intelligence system in the world,” Kerry blasted.

Under Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, the war on drugs intensified, fueled not just by domestic policy, but by foreign entanglements as well. The Reagan administration funneled money to right-wing paramilitaries in Central and South America, offering protection to cocaine traffickers like Nicaragua’s Manuel Noriega.

The War on Drugs pushed by President Ronald Reagan. Even though White people and Black people were selling and using drugs at similar rates, the new drug laws targeted Black people. For example, one law made it a more serious crime to be caught with small amounts of the types of drugs more often found in poor Black neighborhoods than with larger amounts of the types of drugs more often found in rich White neighborhoods. The result of this new policy was that millions of Black Americans were sent to jail. It was a war on Black people, and it devastated Black communities.

In October 1982, President Reagan officially announced his administration’s War on Drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation.73 This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined “others”—the undeserving.

Who wasn’t a drug dealer?” she replied with a laugh. “I think we were all drug dealers back then.” The answer satisfied me. Who was I—Nancy Reagan? The War on Drugs was a war on the poor, on people of color, on anyone who didn’t fit in with the moral majority; the War on Drugs was a war on us.

President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.2 The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war.

Ronald Reagan

It’s worth noting that the period from 1985, when the AP first reported the Contra-cocaine connection, to 1989, when the Kerry Committee report was released, spanned some of the most treacherous years in the war on drugs. That period included two major anti-drug-and-crime bills, in 1986 and 1988. Indeed, at the very moment Ronald Reagan made his special address to warn the nation about crack, the Contras that his administration created were under investigation by the Kerry Committee. Moreover, as he signed legislation in 1986 and 1988 to increase penalties for American drug dealers and users, his administration was turning a blind eye to foreign actors bringing drugs into the country. Worse yet, the administration actively sought to fund its covert operations with the proceeds. —

the lawyer and scholar Michelle Alexander has argued decisively in her now canonical text The New Jim Crow, the precipitous rise of mass incarceration in this country, couched as “the war on drugs,” was part of a continuous history of racial inequity that extends back through history to Jim Crow and convict leasing and slavery before it.35 In this latest iteration, leaders ranging from Presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II, and Clinton, together with local and state legislators, enacted a strategy that blocked or reversed many of the gains secured for people of color through the civil rights movement.

In October 1982, president Reagan officially announced his administration's war on drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation. (49)

The decline in legitimate employment opportunities among inner-city residents increased incentives to sell drugs—most notably crack cocaine. Crack is pharmacologically almost identical to powder cocaine, but it has been converted into a form that can be vaporized and inhaled for a faster, more intense (though shorter) high using less of the drug—making it possible to sell small doses at more affordable prices. Crack hit the streets in 1985, a few years after Reagan’s drug war was announced, leading to a spike in violence as drug markets struggled to stabilize, and the anger and frustration associated with joblessness boiled. Joblessness and crack swept inner cities precisely at the moment that a fierce backlash against the Civil Rights Movement was manifesting itself through the War on Drugs.

In October 1982, President Reagan officially announced his administration's War on Drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation.

The resistance within law enforcement to the drug war created something of a dilemma for the Reagan administration. In order for the war to actually work—that is, in order for it to succeed in achieving its political goals—it was necessary to build a consensus among state and local law enforcement agencies that the drug war should be a top priority in their hometowns. The solution: cash. Huge cash grants were made to those law enforcement agencies that were willing to make drug-law enforcement a top priority.

The resistance within law enforcement to the drug war created something of a dilemma for the Reagan administration. In order for the war to actually work—that is, in order for it to succeed in achieving its political goals—it was necessary to build a consensus among state and local law enforcement agencies that the drug war should be a top priority in their hometowns.

That legislation carved a huge exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, the Civil War–era law prohibiting the use of the military for civilian policing. It was followed by Reagan’s National Security Decision Directive, which declared drugs a threat to U.S. national security, and provided for yet more cooperation between local, state, and federal law enforcement. In the years that followed, Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton enthusiastically embraced the drug war and increased the transfer of military equipment, technology, and training to local law enforcement, contingent, of course, on the willingness of agencies to prioritize drug-law enforcement and concentrate resources on arrests for illegal drugs. The incentives program worked. Drug

Some federal judges, including conservative judges, have quit in protest of federal drug laws and sentencing guidelines. Face-to-face with those whose lives hang in the balance, they are far closer to the human tragedy occasioned by the drug war than the legislators who write the laws from afar. Judge Lawrence Irving, a Reagan appointee, noted upon his retirement: “If I remain on the bench, I have no choice but to follow the law. I just can’t, in good conscience, continue to do this.”83 Other judges, such as Judge Jack Weinstein, publicly refused to take any more drug cases, describing “a sense of depression about much of the cruelty I have been a party to in connection with the ‘war on drugs.

The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism. Reagan

By declaring “I support states’ rights” just miles from the spot where the civil rights workers were murdered, Reagan revealed—to those who knew anything about dog whistles—that behind his grandfatherly pose he was a strong supporter of white supremacy, as his actions during his presidency would prove. His opposition to civil rights legislation, escalation of Nixon’s war on drugs, and support for apartheid South Africa were prefigured at Neshoba. Every Mississippian could decode the message.