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Anti-Drug War Movement

With the exception of one or two local attempts at alcohol prohibition all drugs were legal in America from its inception until the early 20th century. The earliest anti-drug laws were typically small, localized, efforts targeted against various minority groups such as the anti-opium laws targeting Chinese on the west coast or the anti-marijuana laws aimed at Mexicans in the southwest, and so generated little attention among other Americans. There was a small opposition movement confined primarily to lawyers and constitutional scholars who saw the inherent problems with drug prohibition and wrote about them, but their work was largely limited to occasional articles in law journals and other non-mainstream publications. As far back as 1953, Rufus King, the chairman of the American Bar Association Committee on Narcotics, explained in an article in the Yale Law Review how U.S. drug policies serve to keep drug prices artificially high and by doing so, in effect encourage drug dealers.

After the upheaval of the 1960s, with the Nixon presidency came the phrase War on Drugs, an idea designed to shift social policy away from the “liberal” policies of Lyndon Johnson's administration and give more power to law enforcement so as to appear to crack down on the “troublemakers” and restore “traditional American values.” Nixon called drugs “public enemy number one” and declared an “all-out global war on the drug menace.”

During the four decades beginning with the Nixon administration, during which a succession of elected officials from both political parties presided over tremendous increases in anti-drug enforcement budgets, prison building, and what some argue was a deterioration of civil liberties, an increasingly influential anti-drug war movement was born. Its message, no longer relegated to an occasional article in a scholarly journal, began to get sporadic coverage in the mainstream press.

Drug Policy Reform Organizations

The National Organization for the Repeal of Marijuana Laws (NORML) was founded in 1970. The organization grew rapidly and its founder Keith Stroup worked closely with President Carter's senior drug policy advisor Peter Bourne to change marijuana laws. Success seemed likely until Stroup confirmed Bourne's cocaine use at a NORML party. That stirred up a significant backlash from well-organized parents groups and progress on the issue began to reverse itself. NORML is still in existence and has a significant public presence, in part due to celebrities such as country singer Willie Nelson, comedian Bill Maher, and PBS travel show host Rick Steves speaking on their behalf. Remembering the key role women played in the repeal of alcohol prohibition NORML started the NORML Women's Alliance in 2010.

The founding of the Drug Policy Foundation by Arnold Trebach and Kevin Zeese in the mid-1980s was a major step in the anti-drug war movement.

Over the last quarter of a century that organization has grown to be the largest and one of the most respected organizations opposing the War on Drugs. Its leadership has been assumed by Ethan Nadelmann, one of the movement's most astute scholars, and its name changed to the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA).

With the movement's growing awareness of the large numbers of Americans who had smoked marijuana at some point in their lives typically with no ill effects the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), an organization advocating legalization of marijuana, grew to prominence rapidly. Started by Chuck Thomas and Rob Kampia in 1995 and based in Washington, D.C., MPP is the best-funded national organization working for marijuana legalization in the United States. With a yearly operating budget of $6 million it became a powerhouse in the drug reform movement. Thomas left MPP and started the Interfaith Drug Policy Initiative (IDPI) to organize religious leaders to speak out against the War on Drugs.

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