Chapter Eight - War on Some People

CHAPTER EIGHT

War on Some People

BY THE TIME the 1960s rolled around, weed was fully criminalized. At least on paper. But something else was happening on the ground.

The country was changing.

Civil rights protests. Anti-war marches. Black Panthers. Hippies. Counterculture. Consciousness. Color. Class. Chaos.
In the middle of all that noise and upheaval, the people in charge looked around and said, “we need to shut this down.”

They didn’t say it out loud.
Not all at once.
But the blueprint was already there.

And in 1971, President Richard Nixon made it official.

Nixon didn’t declare war on poverty.
Or injustice.
Or addiction.

He declared a War on Drugs.

Weed was lumped in with heroin, LSD, cocaine, and whatever else made suburban parents nervous. The Controlled Substances Act was passed, placing cannabis in Schedule I, the category for drugs with no medical use and high potential for abuse.

That meant it was now legally worse than cocaine.
(And meth, and crack, and fentanyl)
Still is.

The war had a name.
It had funding.
It had cops.
And it had a target: anyone not playing by the rules of white, middle-class America.

Decades later, one of Nixon’s top aides, John Ehrlichman, admitted the truth in a later interview:

“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.”

That’s not a conspiracy theory.
That’s a quote.
From the inside.

This wasn’t a war on substances.
It was a war on movements.
On people.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan picked up the baton and ran with it, straight into the prison-industrial complex.

Mandatory minimums exploded.
No-knock raids surged.
The phrase “Just Say No” became a national mantra, easy to say if your dad wasn’t getting arrested over a joint.

Weed possession, especially in Black and brown neighborhoods, went from misdemeanor to felony fast. Families were broken apart. Generations were locked up. The media called it justice.

White college kids still smoked behind dorms.
But poor kids?
They got police.

This era also saw the rise of crack cocaine, which was treated like the apocalypse. While weed wasn’t quite on the same level in the public narrative, it was part of the same ecosystem, the same fear machine.

Crack (used more in Black neighborhoods) carried harsher sentences.
Powder cocaine (used more in white suburbs) got a slap on the wrist.
Weed possession could get you years in prison if you were the wrong color or zip code.

This wasn’t enforcement.
It was engineering.
A system built to filter out the "undesirable."

This chapter of history didn’t just criminalize behavior. It built infrastructure.

Private prisons profited off inmate labor.
Three strikes laws could trigger life sentences for non-violent drug offenses.
Asset forfeiture let police seize property before trial.
School-to-prison pipelines locked in future generations.

And weed, the same plant once used in temples and medicine bowls, had become a ticket to a record, a cell, and a label that followed you forever.

Not because it hurt people.
Because it was useful to power.

The war on drugs wasn’t about drugs.
It was about lines.
Who gets to cross them.
Who gets to be forgiven.
Who gets to be removed.

Cannabis wasn’t the cause.
It was the tool.