In the 1960s, rising addiction rates in American cities coupled with increasing heroin use among U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam caused President Richard M. Nixon to take notice.
Based on studies demonstrating links between crime and heroin addiction, Nixon categorized higher rates of drug use — particularly among Black Americans — as a crime problem, not a public health issue. In 1971, Nixon declared a War on Drugs, unleashing policies that criminalized substance use and led to the disproportionate incarceration of people of color.
Yet these policies weren’t just about responding to escalating drug use across U.S. cities. It was a way to control predominantly Black and Latino communities as they participated in the struggle for Black freedom.
After the passage of landmark civil rights legislation and uprisings in the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Watts, Los Angeles, and Newark in the mid-1960s, the Nixon White House was determined to reassert White, middle class dominance. By investing in anti-drug campaigns, prison construction and policing in low-income urban areas, Nixon’s War on Drugs laid the building blocks for mass incarceration in America.
As part of this program, Nixon also initiated a nationwide expansion of methadone treatment, a radical departure from traditional approaches to drug policy that emphasized supply reduction.
In 1970, psychiatrist Robert DuPont, who would become Nixon’s second drug czar in 1973, established the Narcotic Treatment Administration (NTA), a large, federally funded methadone program that originated in a D.C. jail. In a 2019 interview, Dupont proudly recalled that the NTA “treated 15,000 heroin addicts in the course of three years and dropped the monthly rate of crime by half.”
Such a comment exposed the problem. The Nixon administration saw methadone as a way to reduce crime rather than treat addiction. Many of the physicians and researchers who studied methadone in the early-1970s focused on crime metrics — how methadone could increase the street price of heroin or decrease opiate-offense charges, for example — instead of how methadone could improve patients’ quality of life or other health outcomes.
In studying methadone’s relationship to crime — an association that was never proved to be causal — people on methadone were not understood as patients struggling with an addiction but as criminals whose addiction drove rising crime rates. According to DuPont, it was the “dramatic change” in D.C. crime rates that Nixon “noticed.” In 1972, just two years after the creation of the NTA, the FDA approved methadone as a treatment for opioid addiction.