Reefer Madness Finds A New Home With Nicotine

A rerun of the war on drugs is being played. Reefer Madness is knocking on nicotine’s door.

By now, the adverse effects of the “war on drugs” are well known. As Christopher Moraff said, the strategy can best be summed up as the term was used “to divert attention from the fact that the conflict to prevent illicit drug use through violence is a war on people, not a war on drugs.”  

The examples of a drug-related war on people are legion. Jaylin Hughes was left paralyzed, Bryce Masters ended up brain-damaged, and Ryan Wilson didn’t survive after encounters with the police over suspected cannabis use. There are 1000s of more examples of tragic outcomes from police violence inflicted on unarmed citizens, often involving the use of substances. The situation has become so dire that the American Public Health Association has deemed police violence a public health crisis.

The U.S. has been pushing drug abstinence since the 1800s, at one time targeting opium dens frequently located in Chinese neighborhoods. Future laws also targeted certain races or ethnic groups. For example, stiffer penalties were enacted for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine, although they are pharmacologically the same. Crack cocaine was used more often by Black people than White people. Early marijuana laws targeted Mexican immigrants.

In the 70s, President Nixon made the war on drugs official, a war that was more about criminalizing Black people than about public health. This began the era of mandatory sentences, no-knock warrants, and escalating police violence with little effect on street-level drug activity. Drugs were already shrouded in misinformation, and the 70s saw a rapid progression away from science and vaulted towards using fear and stigma to fuel a moral panic about substance use.  

Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, is no stranger to the war on drugs. He has been a staunch advocate for drug reform for decades. At a 2019 drug policy reform conference, he brought the debate over reduced-risk nicotine products to the attention of attendees. “My fear is that not only are we taking a major step backwards [in cutting smoking rates], but we may be at the beginnings of the great new drug war of the 21st century,” he said.

Michelle Minton warned people in 2021 when she said, “If we genuinely want to bring an end to draconian drug laws, minimize encounters with law enforcement, and create a society that treats substance users—regardless of what they use—with respect instead of violence, we must make sure the effort to prevent diseases related to smoking doesn’t turn into a “war” on nicotine and the people who use it.”

Since those warnings, the war on nicotine has become fully engulfed by the war on drugs playbook. All the significant chapters are covered -  fear, stigma, discrimination, criminalization, and misinformation.  Every chapter steers people who smoke tobacco away from less harmful alternatives. And while the people who smoke continue to die from smoking, their deaths are justified in the moral panic about youth initiating the use of safer alternatives to smoking. A moral panic familiar to those versed in the days of Reefer Madness. 

Now, we are hearing calls for a prohibitionist approach to nicotine, and unsurprisingly, it leads to a war on people.  A war that, in particular, most dramatically impacts the vulnerable and marginalized, including  Black people and people who have a disability. Nadelmann’s fears have come true. The U.S. is again facing an onslaught of disastrous interactions with law enforcement, often involving excessive force against unarmed people who use nicotine. 

Ocean City, MD, is the most well-known example of good intentions gone wrong. When the ban on smoking and vaping on the Boardwalk took effect in 2015, city officials said they expected “voluntary compliance.” City Manager David Recor claimed the city’s approach would not be to haul people to jail for smoking or vaping on the boardwalk. “We don't expect to take a heavy hand but expect visitors to self-police themselves." 

Yet, heavy-handed enforcement is what has happened to violators. Visitors to the Boardwalk have been pepper sprayed, tased, hogtied, beaten, and arrested because they used nicotine. Media and the public are still waiting for some of the details of the investigation into the police department's use of force against patrons of the Boardwalk.

Civil rights community leaders spoke out after a brutal week in 2021 where several Black teens vaped and were the victims of police violence in Ocean City. In a statement, Dana Vickers Shelley, executive director for the ACLU of Maryland, said, “Disturbingly, Ocean City police didn’t even try to de-escalate, especially over something as minor as vaping, which is not a criminal issue. The amount of force used here was inappropriate.”

A letter of concern from over two dozen organizations to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stated: “In the end, tobacco policy will no longer be the responsibility of regulators regulating, but police policing. Our experience with alcohol, opioid, and cannabis prohibition teaches us that that is a policy disaster waiting to happen, with Black and other communities of color bearing the brunt.”

Waging war on the substances people want to put in their bodies has not worked in the past, isn’t working in the present, and will most certainly fail in the future. Ending prohibition and criminalization by regulating substances (including nicotine) to enable consumers to practice harm reduction, open the market to businesses of all sizes, and generate taxes to support our communities will help reduce the police violence used on unarmed people simply because they used a substance.

Experts at the United Nations called for an end to the war on drugs, stating that it is a war on people. That proclamation should include nicotine.