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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."
Nixon official: real reason for the drug war was to criminalize black people and hippies - Vox
Didn't we already know this had to be at least part of the reason? Look, I thought Nixon was a good/great president in a lot of ways but I was always clear that he ran a lot like Mayor Daley of Chicago...what ever got the job done was AOK with him. I was a Conservative back then in the sense that I was a kid in a conservative house in a conservative town.
Note to Mods: this is harper's mag via Vox, I am hoping I am in the right place.
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