over four thousand agents. And though the agency’s operations routinely ran afoul of the Constitution, the public willingly began to surrender bits and pieces of the Bill of Rights because the fear of drugs was now palpable.

In truth, the actual number of heroin addicts throughout the Nixon era remained fairly stable. According to the Pentagon and other government sources, it peaked in 1969 and may have actually been declining when the war on drugs was launched.^[7] In any event, the totals were always modest. Even the White House at its most extreme was never talking about more than three people in a thousand.^[8] But by blurring the distinction between marijuana and heroin, the prohibitionists effectively added 40 million pot-smokers to the total, and 45 million drug users was a frightening epidemic by any measure.^[9] 

Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, thought jailing people for smoking marijuana was counterproductive.^[10]  He was not alone. A presidential commission appointed by Nixon himself had recommended decriminalization as early as 1972—a stunning embarrassment for the White House. Nixon had appointed a Republican drug hawk, former Pennsylvania Governor Ray Shafer, to head the commission, and his job was to create a scientific foundation for the administration’s hard line on marijuana.  But after months of digging, the facts overwhelmed the folk tales and the Shafer Commission reversed engines: “Marihuana use, in and of itself, is neither causative of, nor directly associated with crime...”^[11]  They found no basis for the gateway theory. Alcohol, they said, was probably a greater danger, and they concluded that personal use of marijuana should no longer be a crime.^[12]  Nixon buried the report but the facts were on the table nonetheless.

At the same time, a lot of people were disturbed by the way police and prosecutors were using the drug laws as a political sledgehammer. In Texas, Black Panther Otis Lee Johnson