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Nixon Takes Office
When President Nixon took office in 1969, America's consumption of illegal substances was shifting from a hidden, marginal activity to a symbol of youth revolt and the basis of a new, underground economy. -
Drug Controll Spending Package
Nixon was the first president to attempt to create a policy aimed at curbing drug-taking. When he began his second term, the drug-control spending package for 1973 that he pushed through Congress amounted to $420 million — more than eight times the amount appropriated before his presidency. -
Watergate
Though Nixon resigned under pressure in 1974 for covering up the series of political scandals known collectively as “Watergate,” some experts call his drug policy more sensible and better-managed than those of his successors. His policy included providing heroin addicts with methadone, which satisfies the drug craving without producing a high; establishing treatment programs for hard-core drug users rather than locking them up; and focusing efforts on drug addicts in poor neighborhoods rather t -
Crack Boom
Crack was a new, cheap, smokable form of cocaine. Unlike cocaine's expensive powder form — which had enjoyed glamour status among musicians, celebrities, models and their hangers-on, as it had in the early 20th century — crack was cooked up in apartment ovens by drug traffickers who combined powder cocaine with baking soda. The resultant “rocks” made a popping sound as they were smoked, hence the name “crack.” They also offered an immediate and powerful but short-lasting high. As crack addiction -
"Just Say No"
Nancy Reagan's “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign. But about three-quarters of the anti-drug budget was still being used to cut off supplies. -
Interdiction Campaign
Demand for crack fueled a cocaine processing and smuggling business based in Colombia, where traffickers soared to prosperity virtually overnight. They were swimming in wealth that went far beyond what marijuana profits had offered. The narcotraficantes built palatial homes and gunned down anyone who got in their way, up to and including judges, public officials and even a presidential candidate, Luís Carlos Galán, murdered in 1989 by a hit-man for drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. -
War On Pot
President Bill Clinton took office as the first president to have admitted ingesting an illegal drug. His insistence that he “didn't inhale” when trying marijuana as a Rhodes Scholar in England in the late '60s was roundly ridiculed. -
South Florida Task Force
The Reagan administration set up a South Florida Task Force under the National Narcotic Border Interdiction System, an inter-agency group made up of members of the DEA and the U.S. Customs Service and headed by then-Vice President George H. W. Bush. By the time Bush became president in 1988, the stage was set for even more dramatic action.