Well then ... the fun question is, I guess, who _did_ start the crazy, anti-drug systems we have now? The next time I remember hearing about insanity in prison sentences for drugs was during the Clinton administration. Did it start then? Or was it before then, as well?
The real bipartisan push for harsher penalties in the US came in the 1980s after basketball star Len Bias died of cocaine overdose:
>...It became the sole focus of legislative activity for the remainder of the session on both sides of the aisle. Literally every committee, from the Committee on Agriculture to the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries were somehow getting involved. Suddenly, the Len Bias case was the driving force behind every piece of legislation. Members of Congress were setting up hearings about the drug problem and every subcommittee chairman was looking to get a piece of the action...
If you want to go back further, a good person to start with is Harry Anslinger who headed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics:
>...Prior to the end of alcohol prohibition, Anslinger had claimed that cannabis was not a problem, did not harm people, and "There is probably no more absurd fallacy"[15] than the idea it makes people violent. His critics argue he shifted not due to objective evidence but self-interest due to the obsolescence of the Department of Prohibition he headed when alcohol prohibition ceased - campaigning for a new Prohibition against its use.
A difference with Nixon is that he was one of the first to try to greatly expand drug treatment and also reform sentencing in at least a small way:
>...the mandatory minimum sentence in a federal prison for marijuana possession was 2-10 years until Nixon slashed it to 1 year with a judicial option to waive even that sentence. No federal mandatory drug sentence would be rolled back again for 40 years (in the Obama Administration).
>The Nixon Administration also repealed the federal 2–10-year mandatory minimum sentences for possession of marijuana and started federal demand reduction programs and drug-treatment programs. Robert DuPont, the "Drug czar" in the Nixon Administration, stated it would be more accurate to say that Nixon ended, rather than launched, the "war on drugs". DuPont also argued that it was the proponents of drug legalization that popularized the term "war on drugs".[17][unreliable source?]
>The presidency of Ronald Reagan saw an expansion in the federal focus of preventing drug abuse and for prosecuting offenders. In the first term of the presidency Ronald Reagan signed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which expanded penalties towards possession of cannabis, established a federal system of mandatory minimum sentences, and established procedures for civil asset forfeiture.[50] From 1980 to 1984 the federal annual budget of the FBI's drug enforcement units went from 8 million to 95 million.
tl;dr: Nixon removed mandatory minimums for drug sentences, Reagan reinstated them.
