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Reagan's War on Drugs has left a more tangled legacy of racial inequality in California's criminal justice system. In theory, Reagan's policies focused on suppressing crops and drug traffickers abroad, improved search and seizure along the U.S.-Mexican border, and tough criminal penalties for users at home. In California, law-enforcement officials concentrated their resources in poor, urban neighborhoods. Their assumption centered on crack cocaine as an inner-city scourge. But according to the Schaffer Library on Drug Policy, affluent whites trafficked far greater quantities of cocaine than the urban poor.

Nonetheless, this bias in the criminal justice system resulted in increased racial profiling -the practice of singling out suspects solely on the basis of skin color or accent-of African Americans. In addition, the San Jose Mercury News undertook a special study in 1991, reviewing more than 700,000 California criminal cases between 1981 and 1990. They uncovered statistical evidence that showed consistent favoring of whites over minority defendants throughout the state's criminal justice system.

This bias skewered from the onset the racial composition of California's growing prison population. By 1999, the New York Times found that at least 90 percent of people locked up for crack cocaine were poor African Americans, even though twice as many whites as blacks use crack, and three times as many whites as blacks use powder cocaine.

As a result, during the 1980s California began to build more prisons. In 1980, 379 Californians were sent to prison for drug possession; by 1999, that number grew to 12,749 convictions. As of 2003, the state has 33 prisons with an operating budget of four billion dollars. But as money to build state prisons grew, the amount of public funding for California's K-12 schools, colleges, and universities decreased.

Research conducted by the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice found that the number of African-American males in U.S. prison has more than quadrupled (from 8,139 to 41,434 people) between 1980 and 1996, while the number of African American males enrolled in public higher education has only increased by 29 percent (6,852 to 8,810). Applying those statistics to California, the report predicted that young men growing up in Oakland or Los Angeles are twice as likely to end up in prison as in college.

As part of the War on Drugs initiative, Nixon increased federal funding for drug-control agencies and proposed strict measures, such as mandatory prison sentencing, for drug crimes. He also announced the creation of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP), which was headed by Dr. Jerome Jaffe.

Nixon went on to create the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973. This agency is a special police force committed to targeting illegal drug use and smuggling in the United States. 

At the start, the DEA was given 1,470 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Today, the agency has nearly 5,000 agents and a budget of $2.03 billion.

Say No to Drugs

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan reinforced and expanded many of Nixon’s War on Drugs policies. In 1984, his wife Nancy Reagan launched the “Just Say No” campaign, which was intended to highlight the dangers of drug use.

President Reagan’s refocus on drugs and the passing of severe penalties for drug-related crimes in Congress and state legislatures led to a massive increase in incarcerations for nonviolent drug crimes. 

In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established mandatory minimum prison sentences for certain drug offenses. This law was later heavily criticized as having racist ramifications because it allocated longer prison sentences for offenses involving the same amount of crack cocaine (used more often by black Americans) as powder cocaine (used more often by white Americans). Five grams of crack triggered an automatic five-year sentence, while it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to merit the same sentence.

Critics also pointed to data showing that people of color were targeted and arrested on suspicion of drug use at higher rates than whites. Overall, the policies led to a rapid rise in incarcerations for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997. In 2014, nearly half of the 186,000 people serving time in federal prisons in the United States had been incarcerated on drug-related charges, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper’s Magazine.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“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. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “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.”