How Did Nixon Use Cocaine In The 1980s

In the United States during the 1980s, cocaine was the sugar boost that many businessmen and upper-class whites indulged in to “increase productivity”. Cocaine was primarily limited to the economically superior due to a limited availability, which launched prices, and as a result the drug would often be used as a display of class and status that was hardly obtainable by minorities or the lower-classes. In the White House during the end of the 1960s to the early 70s was Richard Nixon who was socially disconnected from the counterculture of both the decades. Nixon, who was already in his late forties at the beginning of the 1960s, was simply too old to be a part of the counterculture of the drug loving decade, so Nixon had little understanding

Regan’s tactic for the War on Drugs was directed towards the two most popular drugs of the 1980s, cocaine and crack. Crack is cocaine combined with chemicals to create a smokable and more producible drug. Criminalizing crack and cocaine lead to the incarceration of one in every three Black men while imposing minimum sentences, creating longer sentences, and reclassifying various drugs from misdemeanor to felony crimes. Crack use become enough of a serious concern to the public that in 1986 one-third of calls to a drug hotline were about the drug. In 1995 Bill Clinton escalated the seriousness of drug crimes by establishing the “three strikes, you’re out” policy, The “three strikes, you’re out” policy declared that any person with three violent crime charges would be put on trial for a life sentence, moreover it stated that any drug felony is equivalent to a violent crime. So, with possessing marijuana, crack, or cocaine being reclassified as a felony, these minor drug offenses could turn into a lifetime sentence. From 1983 to 1989 the American prison system increased from 14,301 inmates to nearly 40,000, a 180% increase. For race, by 1989 the arrest rates for whites was 365 for every 100,000 while for blacks the rate was 1,460 per 100,000, thus the incarceration rate for blacks was four times higher

The war impacted the lives of students that became involved with drugs resulting in an educational trap where the drug user had no ability to expand their education. 80% of students with drug violations where either suspended or expelled preventing them from an opportunity to turn around their lives. The effect on education escalated Drug Free Student Loans Act of 1998 that punished drug law offenders by temporarily or permanently denying federal student financial aid, and the act was an extension to a 1994 law that that denied aid to prisoners. This restriction on higher education forced former drug users from moving upward in the social ladder. The War on Drugs continued to hurt the youth outside of their