"Did Nancy Reagan's War on Drugs Backfire?"

The question in the title of this post is the headline of this intriguing new NBC News commentary by Tony Dokoupil. For reasons I will explain after an excerpt, I think this question is an unfair variation on the "When did you stop beating your wife?" question. But first, here are some excerpts:

It's one of the risks of a long and busy life: the threat that society will change its mind about your most important work. That happened to Nancy Reagan, the former first lady who died on Sunday at 94.  President Ronald Reagan's wife and closest adviser defined the drug panic of the 1980s, coining the phrase "Just Say No" and supporting her husband's rampaging war on drugs.  She often singled out marijuana as a special scourge, accusing dealers of taking "the dream from every child's heart."

But such positions have since slipped into disrepute in recent years, rejected even by many fellow Republicans. Nearly half the country has tried marijuana, meanwhile, and legal sales are booming in four states and counting.  Criminal justice reform, including reducing sentences for nonviolent drug convictions, has been a point of discussion on both sides of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Nancy Reagan never publicly recanted or so much as commented on her starring role in the drug war.  But with a look back at the origins of her and her husband's hardline policies, it's possible to trace the arc of one of America's most famous failures.

Ronald Reagan, eyeing a challenge to President Jimmy Carter, seemed to know that an attack on marijuana would tap into a growing displeasure with wayward teens, slack productivity and a society of apathetic Carter voters.  So in a major radio address in 1979 Reagan revealed what "science now knows," including the dubious "scientific facts" that smoking dope leads to cancer, sterility and "irreversible effects on the mental processes."  Never mind that the National Academy of Sciences had endorsed the idea of decriminalizing marijuana, finding "no convincing evidence" of its harmful effects.

The drug became an enemy of promise, the explanation for everything.  Why is your teenager refusing to cut the lawn?  Marijuana.  Why is your industry falling behind Japan's?  Marijuana.  Why do you have to lock your door at night? Hard drugs — which start with marijuana.

Nancy Reagan emerged as the most effective carrier of her husband's message.  She focused on almost nothing else during his presidency, beginning with an informal press conference aboard Air Force One in early 1982.  She told the press that drugs had become an epidemic.  Then she made her first stop in a cross-country swing, an open meeting of Straight Inc., a youth rehabilitation program in Florida....

Later on the same tour, during a visit to an elementary school in Oakland, California, she coined her famous phrase. An elementary school student asked her what he should do if anyone ever offered him pot. "Just say no!" she said.

Experts pounced.  The slogan was one of the most unsophisticated anti-drug messages of all time.  It suggested that drugs are evil, but you can quit them at any time.  Yet the phrase served a purpose.  It created what Nancy proudly called "an atmosphere of intolerance."  Other politicians compared drug dealers to vampires, murderers and traitors. And people began to associate pot with waste and dropouts....

In June 1982, Ronald Reagan appeared in the White House garden to officially declare a war on drugs.  "We're taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts; we're running up a battle flag.  We can fight the drug problem, and we can win. And that is exactly what we intend to do," he said.  Marijuana was the only drug to merit specific mention.

Regular readers surely know that I think demonizing marijuana was a mistake as part of the Reagan era "war on drugs." But I actually think Nancy Reagan's "just say no" voice in all this was not nearly as pernicious as this commentary is trying to suggest. Indeed, though an unsophisticated anti-drug message, the "just say no" mantra, in my view, continues to highlight and emphasize the fundamental individual reality at the base of many drug problems even though illegal drug use and abuse includes a lot more complicated issues.

The real problems resulting from the failed American war on drugs, in my view, did not at all emerge from Nancy Reagan urging individuals to just say no to drugs; the real problems flowed from waging the drug war with massive investments in big-government criminal justice system that too heavily invested in cops and cells rather than classrooms and counseling.