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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

1971 Nixon's War on Drugs

American GIs who are addicted to heroin are pictured at the U.S. Army amnesty center at Long Binh in Vietnam, Aug. 1971. Nixon knew that many people, especially southern whites, were afraid of the social progress that the country was making at the time. He also knew that drug use and crime were going up and that tapping into the fears and anxieties, while tying them to race, may have been just the strategy he needed to win. “The wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in the United States of America,” Nixon said in 1968 as he accepted the Republican nomination, becoming the law and order candidate

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Contents of this path:
1. 1960 LAPD Chief Parker Presents on Drug Cases
3. 1971 Nixon's War on Drugs American GIs who are addicted to heroin are pictured at the U.S. Army amnesty center at Long Binh in Vietnam, Aug. 1971. Nixon knew that many people, especially southern whites, were afraid of the social progress that the country was making at the time. He also knew that drug use and crime were going up and that tapping into the fears and anxieties, while tying them to race, may have been just the strategy he needed to win. “The wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in the United States of America,” Nixon said in 1968 as he accepted the Republican nomination, becoming the law and order candidate
4. 1971 Nixon's War on Drugs fter President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, the number of people incarcerated in American jails and prisons escalated from 300,000 to 2.3 million. Half of those in federal prison are incarcerated for a drug offense, and two-thirds of those in prison for drug offenses are people of color. Disproportionate arrest, conviction, and sentencing rates for drug offenses have devastated communities of color in America. The Nixon Administration’s strategy of using drugs to “vilify [African Americans] night after night on the evening news” fostered a politics of fear and anger that reached frenzied heights in the 1990s. Sensationalist media accounts of “soaring” crime rates in the 1980s and early 1990s combined with extraordinary resentment about rehabilitation programs within prisons to create a political environment in which every elected official sought to be “tough on crime.” Decrying that “gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools,” President Bill Clinton in 1994 signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, allotting $12.5 billion to states to increase incarceration