“The Fix: Under the Nixon Administration, America Had an Effective Drug Policy. WE SHOULD RESTORE IT.”
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“New York City alone has records of some 40,000 heroin addicts, and the number rises between 7,000 and 9,000 a year,” President Nixon wrote in his July 14, 1969, message to Congress. “These official statistics are only the tip of an iceberg whose dimensions we can only surmise.”
President Nixon came into office during rampant drug use in the United States, which especially plagued American cities. In 1960, there were over 200 narcotics related deaths in New York City. In 1970, that figure had risen to over 1,000. Joining the Nixon Now Podcast and to talk about Nixon’s drug control policy is Michael Massing. Massing is the former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and is a frequent editor there and in other publications including the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.
He is the author of a definitive book on Nixon’s drug policy called “The Fix: Under the Nixon Administration, America Had an Effective Drug Policy. WE SHOULD RESTORE IT.”
Pictured in the photo above are President Nixon and Dr. Jerome Jaffe, Nixon’s chief of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP). Photo Credit: Nixon Presidential Library.
