Nixon is clearly a bitch, don't get me wrong but I think you're misplacing Blame here. Prohibition in the US really began in 1914 with the Harrison Narcotics Act, the creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930 and The Marijuana Tax Stamp Act in 1937 that all greatly preceded Nixon.
Nixon declared 'the war on drugs' but that's like if Obama declared war on Afghanistan in 2009 - it'd been going on a while before he got into office.
Nixon did change the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to the DEA essentially but in effect that didn't change a lot and otherwise he had the Comprehensive Substance Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 which mostly just created the modern system of drug scheduling. He didn't start prohibition and most of the escalations in drug policy either came before or after him yet he is cited as the godfather of fucking users up the ass because he propagandistically 'declared war'. He basically just coined a phrase.
In fact, throughout the duration of the Nixon Administration, close to 2/3's of the budget for the 'war on drugs' was allocated to treatment and prevention (demand side) and not to incarceration and interdiction (supply side and retributive avenues). These days it's the opposite where the vast majority of WoD funding goes to incarceration and interdiction.
Sorry for the largely off-topic rant, I just wanted to clarify