John Ehrlichman, who served 18 months in prison for his central role in the Watergate scandal, was Nixon’s chief domestic advisor when the president announced the “war on drugs” in 1971. The administration cited a high death toll and the negative social impacts of drugs to justify expanding federal drug control agencies. Doing so set the scene for decades of socially and economically disastrous policies.
Ehrlichman:
Quote:
"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.”
Everyone knows this, we knew it then and we know it now. It literally disenfranchised millions of black men during the 80's and 90's. But why are we surprised?
Don't forget the prison industrial complex is a viable business for some.
Quote:
The individual who’s invested the most in private prisons is Henri Wedell, who started serving on CCA’s board of directors in 2000, when the company was struggling with scandals related to prisoner abuse and mismanagement. He now owns more than 650,000 shares in the company, which is far more successful these days. Those shares are worth more than $25 million.
So the Nixon administration tried to associate black people and hippies with drugs to get public support to ban them? If so, this not only shades heavily Nixon but mainly the racist American public opinion that fell for it.
The War on Drugs is a flop and everyone needs to acknowledge this.
