When President George W. Bush, in the days following the World Trade Centers attacks, announced a global “War on Terror,” he was consciously echoing the words of former president Ronald Reagan, who declared a similar campaign against an abstraction. In fact it goes back even further: Richard Nixon was the first to coin such a phrase, in describing a policy that dated back legislatively since around the Prohibition (an undeclared War on Alcohol) era. But Reagan was the first president to put a literal spin on the message

On this day, October 14, in 1982, in a speech to the Justice Department President Ronald Reagan declared illegal narcotics to be a national threat. He compared the United States’ efforts at drug control to stalwart French defense at the Battle of Verdun.

Reagan brought a more militant approach to drug control and interdiction. He mandated minimum sentences for drug offenders, and allocated $1.7 billion to fight narcotics smuggling from South America. First Lady Nancy Reagan launched a campaign of her own, to educate school-age children about drug resistance and encourage them to “Just Say No.”