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From Nixon to Neuroscience: The War on Drugs and Psychedelic Renaissance
This is an excerpt from Sky Gods and the Recipe for Immortality: The secret influence of psychoactivity over science, society, and the supernatural.
In 1971, Richard Nixon began a War on Drugs that still wages to this day with devastating results. Countless lives have been destroyed by dealing with many substances that have been used and abused for millennia.
Failed Drug War policies have also been disproportionately racist. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization founded by New York University legal professor Bryan Stevenson:
“After President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs in 1971, the number of people incarcerated in American jails and prisons escalated from 300,000 to 2.3 million. Half of those in federal prison are incarcerated for a drug offense, and two-thirds of those in prison for drug offenses are people of color. Disproportionate arrest, conviction, and sentencing rates for drug offenses have devastated communities of color in America.
Between 1980 and 2011, arrests of African Americans for violent and property crimes fell, but rose dramatically for drug offenses. As the Washington…
