Nixon’s War on Drugs and its fatally unintended consequences

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President Richard Nixon launched his War on Drugs in the early 1970s, and two of the fatalities in this war were not drugs at all but rather two young American human beings that I happened to know at the time as acquaintances within my social circle. I guess you could call them “collateral damage” in that war, mere numbers who happened to die while our noble all-knowing government was fighting those elusive demon drugs.
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Forget for a minute the viciously immoral and un-American action of an anointed power figure such as Nixon directing the coercive power of the law, of the police and the courts against the act of recreational self-medication chosen by free individuals – an act that was victimless as long as these individuals were not hurting anyone else. This is a tale of unintended consequences caused by the fatal conceit of elitist holier-than-thou “moralists” with political power.
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In 1968 very few of my friends or acquaintances in my rural community were using outlawed drugs. When we partied, we used alcohol. However, when I returned home in 1970 after a tour of duty in Vietnam, almost all of my close friends were now smoking marijuana – just as an estimated 85% of my combat unit in Vietnam had smoked pot frequently there. In my rural culture, pot was becoming almost everyone’s number one partying choice. There were good times. We slowed down the pace of life and no one got hurt. It was much the same across the rest of America.
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A few of those in our local youth culture stubbornly stuck to their hard-drinking ways. We called them the “Boozers.” One guy, E., was scary. He drank extremely hard while driving insanely fast. I once caught a ride home from him, and I vowed that I would never get into a car with him again. We all agreed that he would never live to be 21.
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Then something weird happened. E. started coming to pot-smoking parties – probably because virtually all the decent young ladies in our area were regularly there. He started to enjoy pot more than alcohol. We would be amazed to see him driving his powerful V8 car slowly along the backroads at an idle to arrive safely home. We started to talk about it and agreed that maybe E. would actually live to be 21 and more. It was a remarkable transformation. He had mellowed out and slowed down.
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Enter the federal government under Nixon. An easy target in this War on Drugs was the Mexican border, where much of the pot that Americans were smoking came across at that time. Nixon increased the number of drug cops and pot-sniffing dogs along that border, and immediately it shut off access to pot in small town areas such as mine.
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Well, it only shut off the flow of pot for a month or two, until pot that was much more powerful started coming in steadily from Columbia in much bigger quantities. There is a lesson in this, an iron law of economics. Where there is a solid demand, suppliers will find a way around obstacles to meet those consumers’ demands. Legal prohibitions will never stop it.
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The more important point I want to make is about the unintended consequences that may occur because of such arbitrary blocking of free-market economic supply. Consumers often have primary or preferred consumer goods as a first choice, for example, pot, and then secondary substitute goods are their second choice if the preferred good is unavailable. With access to the preferred good, pot, temporarily blocked by the whim of coercive government, people picked substitutes.
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The chemistry majors from nearby colleges would come by every community in VW minivans equipped with all they needed to manufacture acid, aka, LSD. They were acid labs on wheels. It was now cheap, available, and it partially filled the consumers’ demands. Nixon did not intend this, but he was instrumental in establishing the use of LSD as a regular party drug by blocking access to pot.
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Other frustrated pot smokers chose other substitute drugs. Our friend E. chose to go back to alcohol. Denied pot, he started to drink hard again and to rev up his big V8 Pontiac and speed off like a rocket down the highway. Then the news hit us: E., with another friend of ours as a passenger, drove that Pontiac off the road and wrapped it around a huge tree. Neither of them reached 21.
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This is part of the tragedy of humanity’s modern loss of freedom. Men who are puffed up with moral righteousness and possessing political power, like Nixon, get arrogant and think they have the wisdom and the right to direct the lives of sovereign individuals. They appoint themselves as social engineers and use law to coerce people toward some kind of imagined ideal of their own.
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However, they have neither the moral right to do this, the political right to do it, nor the wisdom to foresee the unintended consequences of using force to interfere with the peaceful spontaneous order of Free Minds and Free Markets.
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-Zenwind.
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