Reflections on the “War on Drugs” of Nixon and Duterte

With great ignorance comes a greater susceptibility of the public to disinformation and fearmongering tactics. Draconian drug policies cannot be sustained without the existence of a nexus

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of discourses perpetuated by certain institutions that benefit from the ignorance of citizens when it comes to the topic of drugs, as exemplified by then-President Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs” campaign in the early 1970s. The specter of Nixon’s drug war continues to haunt us to this day, especially with its contemporary manifestation in then-President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal crackdown on drug use in the Philippines. What is evident from Nixon’s anti-drug tirades directed at opposition groups to Duterte’s dehumanizing rhetoric directed at destitute drug users living in lower-class neighborhoods is the weaponization of scientifically ignorant drug policies against the populace, accompanied by the mass propagation of disinformation surrounding drug users and drug substances.

As a young undergraduate psychology major, I am naturally drawn to more experimental and novel approaches to the Philippine drug problem that are contrary to what I call the paranoid-schizoid frames of anti-drug rhetoric. I propose that the paranoid-schizoid quality of anti-drug rhetoric from Nixon to Duterte cannot be elucidated via an etiology of mass hysteria by studying the psychology of anti-drug political personalities but rather by a discursive investigation into the unconscious mechanisms behind the construction of moral panic.

Assessing the “War on Drugs” campaigns, the fantasy of drugs undermining civilized society dominates over objective assessments of psychoactive substances and their use. Furthermore, speaking as a prospective psychedelics researcher, what is troubling to me is the blanket conceptualization of “illegal drugs” in anti-drug rhetoric, conflating both hard and soft drugs into a single category. The logical conclusion of the ignorant assumption that “all drugs are the same” is a resistance to distinctions between valuable and detrimental drugs, as well as to the researchers and promoters of drugs.

Therefore, I argue that the first casualty of the paranoid-schizoid frame of anti-drug rhetoric is genuine academic research into the physiological and psychological effects of psychoactive substances deemed without medical value, as it is in the case of psychedelics. As such, prospective psychedelics researchers like me become discouraged from exploring the depressive frames of altered states of consciousness for fear of being stigmatized as promoters of illicit substances by the prophets of anti-drug hysteria. Psychedelic drugs in particular have already been marginalized by past repressive discourses.

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