Aide To President Richard Nixon Admits War On Drugs Specifically Targeted Black People

Richard Nixon’s Former Aide Reveals The Truth Behind The “War On Drugs”

Harper’s Magazine writer Dan Baum has shared with the world the purpose behind the infamous “War On Drugs”that became popular in the 1970’s under President Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon…

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.”

There’s some sobering truth for yo a$$…

Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction.

While many of us have already filed this information under “No S#!t, Sherlock”, it’s good to hear our suspicions validated by someone who has first-hand knowledge of how the government planned to purposely disenfranchise the black community.