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I have nothing more to write on the article.
Oh, I do.
Even though the war on marijuana was begun by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, it has always received strong bipartisan support.
While I agree that the WOsD has had strong bipartisan support it is simply poor researching that concludes that Reagan started the war on marijuana. Especially after having written about this...
In fact, some of the strongest opposition to the arrest and imprisonment of marijuana users has come from conservatives like William F. Buckley, the economist Milton Friedman and Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico.
...and this...
In 1972 a commission appointed by President Richard Nixon concluded that marijuana should be decriminalized in the United States.
Now if this reporter could find information regarding Nixon and the '72 commission then why couldn't this information also be found...
The Drug War as a Socialist Enterprise by Milton Friedman
In 1972, almost twenty years ago, President Nixon started a war on drugs-the first intensive effort to enforce the prohibition of drugs since the original Harrison Act.
However, even Friedman doesn't go back far enough for my satisfaction. Consider Lyndon B. Johnson!
LBJ State Of The Union Address: 1968
This year, I will propose a Drug Control Act to provide stricter penalties for those who traffic in LSD and other dangerous drugs with our people.
I will ask for more vigorous enforcement of all of our drug laws by increasing the number of Federal drug and narcotics control officials by more than 30 percent. The time has come to stop the sale of slavery to the young. I also request you to give us funds to add immediately 100 assistant United States attorneys throughout the land to help prosecute our criminal laws. We have increased our judiciary by 40 percent and we have increased our prosecutors by 16 percent. The dockets are full of cases because we don't have assistant district attorneys to go before the Federal judge and handle them. We start these young lawyers at $8,200 a year. And the docket is clogged because we don't have authority to hire more of them.
I ask the Congress for authority to hire 100 more. These young men will give special attention to this drug abuse, too.

No, if you want to lay the blame of the war on marijuana/WOsD at the feet of someone then LBJ is the man you're seeking.

I thought it was Reagan:

"While Nixon had gone after the drug users, Reagan waged war on the dealers. He needed more federal police power for that. Reagan was able to press the FBI into service, something presidents Johnson and Nixon had been unable to do. This was after the death of J. Edgar Hoover, who knew the enormous potential for police corruption by the narcotics trade, and had protected his agency from that duty during the sixty years that he led it.
Congress took the ball and ran. One politician after another "piled on" to try to outdo each other in their anti-drug extremism, like sharks in a feeding frenzy, and this culminated in the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1984. This bill appropriated vast sums of money and instituted emergency measures—mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, preventive detention (no bail) for drug suspects, and a market-driven approach to law-enforcement through confiscation of suspects' assets. October 11th, the day of its passage, may well have been the "D-Day" in the War on Drugs.

As Reagan and his Congress were turning the drug war into an inquisition, the Supreme Court was blessing its crusaders with extraordinary new powers. First among them was the broad application of RICO—the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—to drug dealing cases, and the blurring of civil and criminal forfeiture into a single method by which law enforcement agencies could take away someone's home without even filing any charges against them. Police departments were allowed to sell these assets and keep the proceeds. The forfeiture business eventually became so lucrative that law-enforcement agencies dropped practically everything else and went scrambling after boats and homes.

The hundred-year-old Possee Comitatus Act, which had forbid the use of the military in civilian law-enforcement, was suspended. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger advised that, "Reliance on military forces to accomplish civilian tasks is detrimental to both military readiness and democratic process." Others would would use stronger words; that using the military for civilian law-enforcement constitutes martial law.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing us freedom from unwarranted search, was finally rejected. Customs instituted "involuntary indefinite incommunicado detentions," requiring international travelers to defecate into a bag upon demand. The exclusionary rule, which had required that evidence be obtained by legal means, no longer applied as long as the police acted in "good faith" to solve a crime. Probable cause was no longer needed to search people; drug courier profiles, such as "belonging to a minority group associated with the drug trade," were sufficient. Anonymous informants and tips could now be used to obtain search warrants, inviting people to use law-enforcement as a weapon against their enemies. "

It HAS to be Reagan ...

"How Ronald Reagan Solved Two Problems with Cocaine
When times changed, so did the drug wars. Under Ronald Reagan, during the 1980s, drug policy became an important part of the way the U.S. ruling class dealt with two important political problems.

First, Reagan needed a way to finance the counter-revolutionary war that the U.S. was waging against Nicaragua. While everyone knew that the U.S. was running this war, the government couldn't admit it for political, legal and diplomatic reasons. So it had to be officially secret and officially unfunded.

Second, Reagan needed a way to justify his program for dealing with the crisis in the ghettos. In those Reagan years, the economy passed through a hard period of recession and an expansion of "rustbelt" shutdowns. Cuts in government spending and other cutbacks, on top of the huge job loss, created levels of misery that hadn't been seen in 50 years. Such misery created instability and the danger of resistance.

Reagan's people, particularly the forces around Vice President George Bush and the CIA, solved the first problem by taking the counter-revolutionary forces in Nicaragua (the contras) and directing them toward the illegal drug business. The CIA essentially hired the private airlines of drug traffickers in the Caribbean basin to secretly transport guns and supplies for the contras. In exchange, the drug operations of these traffickers and their contra allies were allowed to fly into the U.S. unopposed--including onto major U.S. airports and military bases. Funds from major drug rings in L.A. and Miami flowed to the contras.

Contras and allied drug-traffickers who ran afoul of drug agents were repeatedly helped by their contacts in the U.S. government. Agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency circulated complaints inside the government that whenever they had developed a legal case against some major drug-trafficker, the CIA would come in and use this legal threat to blackmail the trafficker into the network supplying their secret war. And the DEA was then "called off"--because the trafficker was now valuable as an "asset."

Beginning around 1983, and in significant part pushed on by the CIA-sponsored contras themselves, cheap cocaine flooded into ghettos of New York and L.A.--into the economic life of inner cities that were becoming a wasteland of closing factories. Much of it was turned into crack--a smokeable form of cocaine that gives the same intense high at a much cheaper price. Soon, crack was widely available in the ghettos and barrios of New York and L.A. Within several years, nearly every major city was faced with a tidal wave of crack.

The CIA has (predictably) denied any role in the cocaine trade. And the system's mainstream media act like it is "paranoia" to believe that the government might specifically target Black communities with cheap cocaine."