Two years after former President Richard M. Nixon launched a war on drugs in 1971, calling substance use the nation’s “public enemy No. 1,” he made a startling admission during a meeting in the Oval Office.
Speaking to a small group of aides and advisers at the White House in March 1973, Nixon said he knew that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.”
Nixon, who had publicly argued that curbing drug use globally warranted an “all-out offensive,” also privately expressed unease about the harsh punishments Americans were facing for marijuana crimes. “Penalties should be commensurate with the crime,” Nixon said during that Oval Office conversation, calling a 30-year sentence in a case he recently had learned about “ridiculous.”
The remarks were captured on the president’s secret recording system amid a set of tapes that were only recently made widely available. A lobbyist for the cannabis industry in Minnesota pored over hours of the tapes and came across the remarks, which leading historians on the Nixon era said they found revelatory.
The comments, on scratchy, sometimes hard-to-hear recordings, provide a surprising glimpse into the thinking of the president who implemented the federal government’s drug classification system and decided that marijuana belonged in a category of substances deemed most prone to abuse and of no proven medical value. Over five decades, that designation has led to millions of arrests, which disproportionately affected Black people and hobbled efforts to rigorously study the therapeutic potential of cannabis.
These new insights into the way Nixon spoke about marijuana are coming to light as federal marijuana policy is being reconsidered.
In 2022, President Biden issued a proclamation pardoning thousands of people convicted of certain marijuana crimes under federal law. This spring, the Justice Department signaled its intention to downgrade marijuana in the government’s drug regulatory system, citing a consensus by federal health officials that the plant did not belong in the category of drugs deemed most harmful, known as Schedule I, which includes heroin and L.S.D. (Cocaine and fentanyl, for instance, are included in a more lenient category.)
The two main presidential candidates, too, have voiced support for less restrictive marijuana policies. Vice President Kamala Harris said in March that it was “absurd” that marijuana remains a Schedule I drug. Donald J. Trump has also backed loosening marijuana laws.
Support for easing marijuana policy is not universal. In July, 11 attorneys general urged the Department of Justice to keep cannabis in Schedule I. In a letter, they expressed concern about the appeal of newer, more potent strains of THC, the psychoactive component in marijuana, particularly among young users.
Experts on the Nixon years said that they were previously unaware of the recordings of Nixon speaking about marijuana and that the remarks were significant in light of the policies he had championed, which remain the backbone of today’s drug laws.
“It is counter to his image as sort of the ultimate square of the 1960s and ’70s,” said Gregory Cumming, a government archivist and historian who has worked since 2003 at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University who coauthored two books about the Nixon tapes, said the comments bolster other historical evidence suggesting that Nixon’s war on drugs was less a reflection of his personal philosophy than a strategy aimed in large part at undermining his political opponents.
“It reinforces Nixon as a Machiavellian political operative,” Mr. Brinkley said, adding that the former president “dehumanized drug users because it was in his political interest to do so.”
Dr. Jerome H. Jaffe, a psychiatry professor who served as Nixon’s drug czar from 1971 to 1973, said in an interview that he did not recall hearing the former president say that marijuana was not particularly dangerous.
Dr. Jaffe called Nixon’s recorded remarks “an interesting discovery.” But he added that he was “not surprised that a number of people, maybe including Nixon, didn’t think marijuana was as dangerous as heroin or cocaine.”
Dr. Jaffe said discussions of drug policy from the era, in which some American troops were returning from Vietnam addicted to drugs like heroin, often overlook Mr. Nixon’s emphasis on getting people with substance abuse issues into treatment.
Prevailing views on marijuana at the time would have made it politically tough for Nixon to take a more lenient approach, Dr. Jaffe said. “Not everything a politician does at a high level is highly correlated with what they think,” he said.
The legal status of cannabis in the United States had fluctuated for decades by the time Nixon, a Republican, was first elected president in 1968.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, American doctors used cannabis to treat a range of conditions. But in the early 1900s, a surge of migrants from Mexico, some of whom smoked marijuana recreationally, led to a backlash, prompting several states to criminalize its use.
In 1937, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which effectively criminalized recreational cannabis and all but ended research into its medical applications.
In 1969, the Supreme Court found that law unconstitutional because it violated protections against self-incrimination. But a year later, Nixon once again made marijuana use illegal under federal law, signing the Controlled Substances Act, which established a five-tier classification system ranking drugs based on the government’s perception of their medicinal value and potential for abuse.
The Nixon administration provisionally placed marijuana in Schedule I and appointed a commission to study the health risks. Nixon picked nine of the commission’s 13 members.
All along, Nixon made it clear that he intended marijuana to remain illegal, saying in a recorded 1971 conversation that historians documented years ago: “I want a goddamn strong statement on marijuana.”
But a year later, the commission issued a report that seemed starkly at odds with that desire.
The commission concluded that cannabis use did “not constitute a major threat to public health,” and said it had found no compelling evidence to support widely held notions that marijuana was a gateway to more harmful drugs or a driver of violent crime.
Cannabis use should be decriminalized, the commission suggested, urging the government to curb its use through “persuasion rather than prosecution.”
Nixon ignored the recommendations and kept marijuana in Schedule I.
“In the 1970s, we have to remember that there was a significant group of Americans who thought that marijuana was just about the worst drug in the world,” Mr. Cumming said.
Yet the newly noted recordings indicate that he did not share that view.
In a 1972 recording, Nixon can be heard telling a senior aide that he favored a “modification of penalties” as they discussed drug crimes, “but I don’t talk about it anymore.”
In the Oval Office meeting the following year, Nixon was more expansive. John Ehrlichman, a Nixon aide who later went to prison over the Watergate scandal, and Jerry V. Wilson, who at the time was the police chief in Washington, were among those present.
“Let me tell you, I know nothing about marijuana,” Nixon said at one point. “I know that it’s not particularly dangerous, and most of the kids are for legalizing it. But on the other hand, it’s the wrong signal at this time.”
Nixon can be heard pondering whether marijuana is more harmful than other popular substances like alcohol, cigarettes and even coffee. He said he was open to loosening penalties for drug crimes. But at a time when Nixon perceived the government was “starting to win the war on drugs,” he was reluctant to have a candid debate about substance use.
There were earlier signs of a disconnect between Nixon’s drug policies and his private views.
Mr. Wilson, who became a critic of the war on drugs, wrote in 1994 that Nixon had once told him marijuana was likely no more dangerous than the president’s “favorite psychoactive drug,” the martini.
In 2016, Harper’s Magazine published an article that included excerpts from a 22-year-old interview with Mr. Ehrlichman, who was quoted saying that the Nixon administration intentionally misled the public about the danger of drugs to undermine some of its main opponents: Black activists and groups opposed to the Vietnam War.
“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,” Mr. Ehrlichman said, according to Harper’s.
Kurtis Hanna, a Minnesota lobbyist who supports drug legalization, has been fascinated by the history of drug policy ever since he was arrested inside a casino in Iowa in 2009 and charged with possession of marijuana.
Last year, he spent hours listening to recordings on the Nixon Library website, including some that were posted online only in the last couple of years. When he heard Nixon say marijuana was not “particularly dangerous,” Mr. Hanna said, he was shocked.
“He was essentially saying the exact opposite of what I understood him to believe,” said Mr. Hanna, 39, who shared his findings with The New York Times.
Mr. Cumming and Mr. Brinkley said it was unsurprising the remarks had been overlooked. Scholars, they said, have tended to focus more on Nixon’s foreign policy and the Watergate scandal. While the Nixon tapes — some 3,700 hours of recordings in all — have given historians a trove of information, mining them has been a laborious process.
Since Colorado and Washington in 2012 became the first states to legalize recreational cannabis, its use in the United States has soared, turning marijuana into a multibillion dollar industry. Public support for legalizing marijuana has grown, polling shows.
Dr. Peter Grinspoon, a cannabis expert who teaches at Harvard Medical School, said that the Nixon era policy meant that for years the government mainly funded studies looking into marijuana’s dangers and showed little interest in its medicinal value. That has begun to change as experts have come to see cannabis as a promising tool to treat opioid addiction, side effects from cancer treatments and chronic pain.
“The opportunity cost of the policies of that era,” he said, “has been tremendous.”
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