Smoking Gun

Republicans may well try and take away millions of Americans’ right to vote in the next presidential election by enforcing a federal law called the Controlled Substance Act (CSA), a law enacted by President Nixon in 1970.

This law was the brainchild of John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic affairs advisor and John Dean, Nixon’s general counsel. I was Dean’s literary agent for Blind Ambition, a best-selling book about his White House years. While working with Dean on the book, he told me about how the act came about.

He and Ehrlichman came up with the idea to drastically reduce the number of Black and young people being able to vote in Nixon’s upcoming presidential election. Their new law would make smoking or possessing marijuana a felony. If an American citizen is convicted of a felony, they lose their right to vote. Dean told me what the “war on drugs” was really about was taking the vote away from Black people and the anti-war left. The new law resulted in the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which then divided all the drugs Americans used into five categories.