The History of Injecting, Part Three: Nixon’s War and the Bug

In June 1971, President Richard Nixon was in trouble. America was losing the war in Vietnam. Over 40,000 US military personnel had been killed and another 300,000 had been wounded. Public support for the war had collapsed after the Tet Offensive, and the Pentagon Papers exposed years of lies. Protests filled the streets, and few had faith in the government. Inside the White House, Nixon was increasingly paranoid. He believed the media, the universities, and the anti-war left were all out to get him. Nixon needed a new enemy; one he could fight at home.

Nixon’s war on drugs was an act of political survival

Drugs were the perfect target. They were tied to everything Nixon’s voters feared: hippies, Black radicals, anti-war activists, queers, and the poor. By making drugs “public enemy no. 1,” he could make these groups enemies by association. The “War on Drugs” was an act of political survival.

The press was fed a steady diet of menace: addicts, pushers, dope fiends. Time magazine ran an article titled “The Nation: The New Public Enemy No. 1,” describing drug use as an epidemic:

Heroin addiction mounts appallingly among American soldiers in Viet Nam; each returned planeload of G.I.s adds to the drug malaise at home. Once confined to black urban ghettos, the disease has come to invade the heartland of white, middle-class America. Just last week in Detroit, seven addicts were massacred in a gangland-style war for control of the city’s $350 million heroin trade. Within a matter of months in our large cities, the Capone era of the ’20s may look like a Sunday-school picnic by comparison.

William S. Burroughs knew addiction from the inside out. The author of Junkie and a reluctant prophet of America’s underbelly lived the very life the government was demonising. His reflection, “The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn’t believe them about addiction.” was a warning. Lies poisoned the truth. The propaganda was so absurd, so hysterical, that nothing was believed, not even the real danger of addiction.

But it was never about the truth.

Billions were poured into this new war, and government agencies were told to show progress by counting arrests.

Anti-drug war protest

Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, but his drug war rolled on. There was too much money, too many political opportunities for it to stop. Funding flowed to police, private prisons, and the companies that supplied them: surveillance firms, equipment manufacturers, security contractors, and health providers. Between 1971 and 1981, U.S. federal drug control spending grew twenty times, from $84 million to $1.5 billion.

Companies like CoreCivic turned incarceration into a business, making deals with states and corporations to profit from cheap prison labour. Laws let them pay inmates below minimum wage to make everything from highway signs to furniture. Punishment became a supply chain, and misery became a market.

Every administration that followed promised to be tougher than the last. The cycle was perfect: fear bred votes, votes bred crackdowns, and crackdowns bred the very chaos they claimed to cure. Billions flowed into police militarisation and “drug task forces.” Departments built careers, budgets, and reputations on busts.

The U.S. exported its crusade abroad, bankrolling anti-narcotics operations across Latin America that blurred into counter-insurgency wars. From Plan Colombia to the Contras, the line between foreign policy, profit, and political theatre vanished. Cartels grew immensely powerful and violent, while U.S. aid fuelled militarised crackdowns that only made conflicts worse. In Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico, American-trained units and military funding deepened the bloodshed instead of stopping it. Plan Colombia armed paramilitaries accused of massacres; Mexico’s U.S.-backed crackdowns splintered cartels into more violent factions. The result was inevitable — more weapons, more bodies, and a drug trade that kept adapting and thriving.

Countries across Asia and Eastern Europe copied the U.S. model: harsh laws, armed raids, mass imprisonment. Instead of ending supply, it turned whole regions into battlegrounds.

Cocaine routes shifted, heroin production moved, meth labs multiplied. From Colombia to Afghanistan to the Golden Triangle, new suppliers rose to meet the same old demand. Billions were spent, millions were jailed, and drugs became cheaper, purer, and more available than ever.

Australia adopted U.S.-style enforcement. State police forces expanded drug squads. As illicit drugs were demonised, legal ones, alcohol, benzodiazepines, stayed profitable and lightly regulated. Prohibition maintained their dominance.

Then came the bug.

At first, it didn’t have a name. Whispers started in hospital wards and underground papers, a strange illness killing gay men in San Francisco and New York, then people who injected drugs. By 1983, it had a name: AIDS, and the name was a curse. Evangelicals called it divine punishment for perverts. Newspapers screamed of a “gay plague.”

1983 Sydney Morning Herald headline

For people who injected, it was a double bind. The state had already driven them underground; now the virus turned injecting into a potential death sentence. Syringes became symbols of contagion, and users were painted as diseased, to be avoided, as if the bug could leap from one person to another just by being nearby. The war on drugs merged seamlessly with a war on the sick.

But in the margins, something remarkable was happening. In back lanes, squat clinics, and tiny rooms above community centres, people began handing out clean syringes. Not authorised. Not legal. Just necessary. Drug users, nurses, and activists refused to watch their friends die. The first needle exchanges weren’t born from policy; they were born from compassion.

In America, ideology won out over evidence. Under Reagan, the targeting of minorities became institutionalised. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act introduced a 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine - a policy that devastated Black communities. A Black man caught with just one gram of crack faced the same mandatory minimum sentence as a white man caught with 100 grams of powder cocaine: five years in federal prison.

“Just Say No” was an utter failure

Nancy Reagan told a generation to “just say no,” as if drug use were a choice between chocolate and vanilla. The slogan’s simplicity hid the truth: it ignored poverty, trauma, and inequality, turning a complex social issue into a moral failing. The campaign’s focus on individual choice helped justify mass incarceration and hit marginalised communities hardest.

Across Europe, HIV was spreading fast among people who injected drugs in the mid-1980s. Most governments still treated it as a crime, not a health issue, but a few broke away. In the Netherlands, drug users and health workers started giving out clean syringes in 1984 - the first in the world. The UK followed in 1986, running needle exchange trials after HIV rates in Scotland exploded. Switzerland and Germany joined later, often through underground or church-run programs.

In Australia, pragmatism ultimately prevailed. Gay activists, drug users, sex workers, and doctors stood together and demanded action. After repeated failed attempts to establish a needle exchange, Dr Alex Wodak took matters into his own hands. In November 1986, he launched an illegal pilot program at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. It was driven by crisis and kept alive through quiet acts of solidarity - hospital staff, activists, people who used drugs, the Sisters of Charity, and even local police who chose to turn a blind eye.

Dr Alex Wodak

Among those shaping Australia’s response was Professor David Penington, one of the nation’s leading health voices. As chair of key drug and AIDS advisory bodies, he championed evidence over ideology, helping make Australia a world leader in HIV prevention and pushing for honest public debate about drugs and health. His approach treated AIDS as a medical issue rather than a moral one, driving practical reforms such as the national needle exchange program - a radical and fiercely opposed initiative at the time, but one that became central to Australia’s success in preventing HIV transmission.

Australia’s pragmatic harm-reduction approach had proven that evidence could save lives, but that spirit of compassion and realism wouldn’t last forever. As politics shifted and pharmaceutical giants took the stage, a new story began: one not of shared responsibility but of corporate greed. The 21st century would bring a different kind of epidemic, one that was created in boardrooms. A new, far deadlier opioid crisis was coming. It started with prescription opioid misuse but soon moved to illegally manufactured fentanyl.