International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 145

International Journal on Criminology
the generation of students from this era across the world—Bob Marley explained
that if governments did not like cannabis, it was because governments do not truly
like people to think. 79
Reagan: The Former Hollywood Cowboy Resumes Hostilities
On October 14, 1982, Ronald Reagan strongly reaffirmed that drugs were a
threat to the U.S.’ national security. Reagan linked the question of drugs
with organized crime, and drawing inspiration from Florida’s task force,
he further intensified the war on drugs, creating 12 task forces in key areas of the
United States; these could call upon the multiple government agencies already in
place to fight “the war on drugs”: the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, the ATF, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Marshals Services, the U.S. Customs Service,
and the Coast Guard. In some regions, the Department of Defense’s tracking
and pursuit capabilities were made available. 80
Reagan thought that these working groups would make it possible to conduct
an intensive and coordinated campaign against international and national
drug trafficking and against other organized-crime enterprises. 81 Reagan explained
that this initiative could be summed up in simple questions that the United States
had to ask itself: “What kind of people are we if we continue to tolerate in our
midst an invisible, lawless empire? Can we honestly say that America is a land with
justice for all if we do not now exert every effort to eliminate this confederation of
professional criminals, this dark, evil enemy within?” 82
Reagan had the answers. The American people wanted these gangs and
their associates to be brought to justice and their grip on power to be broken—not
out of a sense of revenge, but out of a sense of justice; not only on the basis of the
obligation to punish the guilty, but on the basis of an even stronger obligation to
protect the innocent; not only for legal reasons, but for the good of the law, which
protects freedom. Reagan went on to explain that freedom and justice, as James
Madison had written in The Federalist Papers, are the supreme end of government
and of civil society in the United States, that things had always been this way, and
that this end would always be pursued unless freedom is lost owing to a lack of
justice, since to preserve freedom there must be justice. Reagan concluded by saying
that for the sake of the children and for the honor of all the U.S.’ great achievements
of the past, he called for the support of the American people in this fight
against the drug threat, to eradicate the cancers of organized crime and public
corruption, make streets and homes safe, and return America to how it was during
79 http://www.bobmarley.com/history/.
80 https://reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1982/101482c.htm.
81 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED075187.pdf.
82 https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/101482c.
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