Nixon’s marijuana problem: youth politics and ‘law and order,’ 1968–72

Abstract

While scholarship in carceral studies both credits and blames Richard Nixon for starting the war on drugs, this paper’s focus on youth politics and the marijuana controversy during his first term shows a more complicated story. At first, Richard Nixon’s politics of youth continued the law and order approach that had shaped his campaign in 1968. Nixon railed against the drug culture’s role in the youth revolt as he cheered his aides to “hit it hard,” opting to, “Enforce the law, you've got to scare them.” However, marijuana laws required some leniency after Kent State, when the Ohio State National Guard shot at protesters and killed four students. After Kent State, some polls showed Nixon’s approval rating as low as thirty-one percent on campuses. This problem became even more acute when the voting age fell to eighteen in 1971, allowing over fourteen million youth to vote for the first time. Through his own PR offensive, Nixon also offered an alternative political culture – “square power”– defined as “the fall in a community’s tolerance of moral looseness.” Thus, though Nixon’s marijuana policies may have fallen short of his conservative law and order agenda, he still used the “gateway theory” to link various groups ranging from women, Sunbelt suburbanites, religious voters and ethnic, blue collar whites to expand his constituency.