The War on Drugs Mon, March 21st, 2016 at 12:05 p.m. PDT tagged: mahiwaga, War on Drugs, and Richard Nixon Another example of how politics sometimes dictates policy: At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” Legalize It All • How to win the war on drugs • 2016 Apr • Dan Baum • Harper’s « reverse Being Realistic about Hitler 2016 Mar 21 forward » Hitler Political Timeline 2016 Mar 21 overview all posts from 2016 all posts from Mar 2016 all posts from Mar 21, 2016