One of my favorite articles about the drug war and the most telling quote, from one of Nixon’s henchmen, that the war began for the purpose of destroying Black and liberal communities. All the fake reasons that have been passed along for this atrocity are exposed in this one quotation by John Ehrlichman in an interview he gave to author Dan Baum in 1994. In a surprise response to other questions, Ehrlichman admitted:
You want to know what this was really all about? 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.
Baum, Dan. “Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs.” Harper’s Magazine, April 2016, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all. Accessed 15 Jul 2021.
Countless hundreds of thousands of lives have been ended and ruined by these lies; lies told to gain these politicians and many since then an unfair advantage in their own elections. Some of those ended and ruined lives are innocents from foreign countries that our military and intelligence agencies have mowed down. Others are people murdered because they owned property that was advantageous to government agents to continue conducting their war. Then there are the obvious victims – people who made their own adult choice of recreation in the privacy of their own home. The privacy our own homes was among the first civil liberties to fall.