Former President Nixon declared the “war on drugs” but said in private tapes that weed was “not dangerous”

So, so, so, the guy who signed off on the so-called “war on drugs” in 1971 didn't think weed was a bad drug. Not surprising. Well, in a recently discovered recording from March 1973, then, former President Richard Nixon admitted that he knew marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.” Despite Buddy's role in declaring the war on drugs and opposing a federal commission's recommendation to decriminalize it, he said:

“I don't know anything about marijuana. I know it's not particularly dangerous and most young people are in favor of legalization. But on the other hand, it's the wrong signal at the moment.” He also criticized harsh penalties and said a 30-year prison sentence for cannabis was “ridiculous.”

The footage was recently discovered by Kurtis Hanna, a Minnesota-based cannabis lobbyist, in a trove of materials uploaded by the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. What else is in there?, you might ask.

The crazy thing is that Nixon's comments are in stark contrast to his public image as a staunch anti-drug activist. In 1971, he declared drug abuse “public enemy number one” and launched the war on drugs. The following year, he rejected the recommendations of the Shafer Commission, a group he appointed to study marijuana laws. The commission had proposed decriminalizing marijuana on the grounds that “the criminal law is too harsh a tool for personal possession” and that the harm of marijuana use “is not great enough to justify criminal law intrusion into private life.”

Nixon ignored the commission's findings, but privately acknowledged that marijuana penalties were excessive.

In another recording, the disgraced former president said:

“I have no problem with the fact that there should be an evaluation of the penalties for this, and there should not be penalties like in Texas where people get 10 years for marijuana. That's wrong.” Despite these comments, Nixon made it clear that he did not support full legalization, stating, “But we are not for legalization, I don't want to promote the drug thing.”

Hanna noted, “President Nixon, the man who signed the Schedule I law, who kept marijuana in Schedule I after the Shafer Commission report, and who created the Drug Enforcement Administration by administrative act, did not believe that marijuana was addictive or dangerous.”

What's truly disturbing is that Nixon's domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman later revealed in a 1994 interview that the War on Drugs was partly a political strategy to target “the anti-war left and blacks.” He explained, “By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both on a massive scale, we were able to disrupt those communities. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we knew.”

These very revealing tapes shed light on Nixon's complex and contradictory attitudes toward marijuana and show that his political decisions did not always coincide with his private beliefs.

Who would have thought. Nixon obviously thought it.