subject to federal law.  They’re the business of local cops and state courts. That January, as Mitchell and Ehrlichman explored various means of involving the Executive Branch directly in the fight against crime, they kept running headlong into the Constitution—the first in a series of ultimately fatal collisions with that nettlesome document. Its quaint 18th Century sensibilities seemed unsuited to the dangers these men faced. By reserving all this power to the States, the Tenth Amendment hemmed them in, frustrating their best ideas.  Then somebody mentioned drugs and everybody looked up. Once again it was the perfect target—exotic imports poisoning the nation’s bloodstream—and the federal government already had the authority to bust drug suspects anywhere, any time.^[1]

Many people are under the impression that Richard Nixon started the drug war, but he was simply following the hallowed footsteps of Hamilton Wright, Richmond Hobson, Harry Anslinger, Hale Boggs, and a hundred other political operators over the last half-century who have used narcotics to advance their careers.  Nixon, however, would shift the process into overdrive.  By resurrecting Captain Hobson’s image of the Drug User as Vampire, the Administration was able to focus public anxiety on junkies and dope smokers in a way that made perfect sense to an America whipsawed by war, riots, and an incomprehensible younger generation.  People already suspected marijuana and LSD were at the root of the youth rebellion, and they read in the papers that heroin was driving inner-city blacks to rape and pillage. On the nightly news, these two images began fusing together as heroin and marijuana merged into a single dreadful scourge in the public mind. Nixon’s political genius was to spot these waves of public anxiety before anyone else and to ride them like a surfer. “I believe in civil rights,” he said. “But the right of every American is to be free from violence, and we are going to have an administration that restores that right in the United States of America.”^[2]

In a skillful display of fear management, the White House warned the country that a plague of unimaginable proportions