"hit the marijuana thing, and I want to hit it right square in the puss."

Check out this article that describes Nixon's meeting with Art Linkletter that helped ignite the War on Drugs. Some of it was recorded on the White House tapes. Old radio personalities say the darndest things.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/09/richard-nixon-war-on-...

Some excepts from the article:

"...He had become increasingly bellicose on the subject, even meeting with pop star Elvis Presley in a bizarre White House meeting in December 1970, where Nixon shared his opinion that those who used drugs were “anti-American” and where Nixon gifted Elvis, who would later die of a heart attack linked to drug abuse, with an honorary narcotics officer badge. The president’s efforts seemed to be paying off. A new opinion poll indicated that 23 percent of Americans now viewed drugs as America’s No. 1 problem, up from just 3 percent two years earlier."

"Linkletter had a reason to hate drugs, and in particular Leary, too. He was a father of five, but his youngest child, Diane, had committed suicide two years before. She had been 20 when she jumped to her death from a sixth-story window. He had gone public with his grief after his daughter’s death, lashing out in anger at LSD, the drug he assumed had caused her to die. “It wasn’t suicide, because she wasn’t herself. It was murder … she had a tiger in her bloodstream.” An autopsy revealed no drugs in his daughter’s system, but Linkletter insisted that she had been tripping on acid when she made her leap."

"As he headed to eat with the president, Linkletter was thinking about an article in that morning’s Washington Post—a story about a Nixon administration official who said that penalties for marijuana should be “minimal or non-existent … a fine, like for a parking ticket. ...Linkletter began explaining what he had just read in the Post. Suddenly, he saw the president pick up a phone at the breakfast table. Linkletter listened as Nixon ordered that the administration official who was quoted in the story—the one advocating lenient marijuana sentences—be fired immediately."

"The following month, the president would officially declare war on drugs, asking Congress for an unprecedented $155 million (nearly one billion in today’s dollars) to fight “America’s public enemy No. 1.” The War on Drugs has been with us ever since."