President Nixon Caught On Tape: "MJ IS NOT DANGEROUS"

Even though he declared the war on drugs and refused to decriminalize marijuana as advised by a federal commission, former President Richard Nixon acknowledged in a recently discovered recording that he was aware cannabis is "not particularly dangerous."

“Let me say, I know nothing about marijuana,” Nixon said in a March 1973 White House meeting. “I know that it’s not particularly dangerous, in other words, and most of the kids are for legalizing it. But on the other hand, it’s the wrong signal at this time.”

“The penalties should be commensurate with the crime,” Nixon said, arguing that a 30-year sentence in a cannabis case he recently heard about was “ridiculous.”

“I have no problem that there should be an evaluation of penalties on it, and there should not be penalties that, you know, like in Texas that people get 10 years for marijuana. That’s wrong,” the president said.

The comments, first reported by the New York Times, come as the federal government is reconsidering marijuana’s status as a restricted Schedule I drug.

The Department of Health and Human Services, after conducting a review initiated by President Joe Biden, recommended last year that cannabis should be moved to Schedule III. The Department of Justice agreed, publishing a proposed rescheduling rule in the Federal Register in May.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), however, has expressed hesitation about enacting the reform, however, and has scheduled a public hearing on the cannabis rescheduling matter for December 2, after the upcoming presidential election.

Although Nixon can be heard on the tapes admitting that he felt marijuana penalties were too harsh, he also made clear he didn’t support fully legalizing it.

“But we are not for legalization, I don’t want to encourage the drug thing,” he said in one recording. “We’re starting to win the fight against drugs. This is not a time to let down the bars. and to encourage, basically, people to break open the discussion into the drug culture.”

Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, later conceded that the president’s insistence on criminalizing people over drugs was part of a political ploy to undermine “the anti-war left and Black people.”

“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 in a 1994 interview that was published by Harper’s in 2016. “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.”