The Blueing of America: The Bridge Between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror

The reaction to the Vietnam War protest years, the presidency of Richard Nixon, and ultimately that of Ronald Reagan, ushered in a conservative revolution in the United States that still endures. Republican Presidents during this period have appointed eleven Justices to the United States Supreme Court,1 seven of whom serve on the Court today.2 Coinciding with this historical phenomenon was the proliferation of drug usage in the country: first marijuana, hallucinogenic drugs, and amphetamines during the counterculture years of the late ’60s and ’70s, and later powder and then crack cocaine. When prosecutorial emphasis shifted, especially at the federal level,3 to meet the increased fascination with narcotics, courts in the country became deluged with drug cases, many if not most of which presented Fourth Amendment search and seizure issues. This, of course, was because the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule could make the corpus of the crime unavailable to the prosecution.