How Nixon's paranoia sparked the longest war
It's too early to say that there is a general revolt against the 'war on drugs' that the US has been waging for the past 39 years, but something significant is happening. European nations have been quietly defecting for years, decriminalising personal consumption of some or all of the banned drugs, to minimise harm to their own people, but it's different when countries like Argentina and Mexico do it.
Latin American countries are much more in the firing line. The US can hurt them a lot if it is angered by their actions, and it has a long history of doing just that. But, from Argentina to Mexico, they are fed up with the violent and dogmatic US policy on drugs, and they are starting to do something about it.
In mid-August, the Mexican government declared that it will no longer be a punishable offence to possess up to half a gram of cocaine (about four lines), 5 grams of marijuana (around four joints), 50 milligrams of heroin or 40 milligrams of methamphetamine.
At the end of last month, Argentina's supreme court did something even bolder: it ruled that, under the Argentine constitution, 'each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state' - and dismissed a case against youths who had been arrested for possessing a few joints.
In an ideal world, this ruling would have a powerful resonance in the US, whose constitution also restricts the federal government's right to meddle in citizens' private affairs. It took a constitutional amendment to enable the US Congress to prohibit alcohol in 1919, so who gave Congress the right to criminalise other recreational drugs nationwide by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970? Nobody - and the US Supreme Court has yet to rule on the issue.
But there is little chance that American voters will choose to end this longest of all American wars any time soon, even though its casualties far exceed those of any other American war since 1945.
Elsewhere, however, it is coming to an end much sooner, and one can imagine a time when the job of the history books will be to explain how this berserk aberration ever came about. A large part of the answer will then focus on the man who started the war, president Richard Nixon - so let us get ahead of the mob and focus on him now.
We can do that because of the famous Nixon tapes that recorded almost every word of his presidency. It turns out that he started the war on drugs because he believed that they were a Jewish plot.
We should not conclude he was a single-minded anti-Semite; he was an equal-opportunity paranoid who believed homosexuals, communists and Catholics were also plotting to undermine America with drugs.
The reason for this 39-year war, in other words, is that Nixon thought he was facing a 'Jew-homo-doper-commie-shrink-lefty-pope' conspiracy, as Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten put it in a gloriously deadpan article in 2002. But that is wrong: it is actually a Jew-homo-doper-commie-shrink-lefty-pope-Latino conspiracy.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
