A former aide to former President Richard Nixon revealed the war on drugs was launched as an attack on blacks and the anti-war Left.
John Erlichman, who served as a domestic policy advisor under the Nixon administration and played a prominent role in the Watergate scandal, made the revelation to journalist Dan Baum in 1994.
Baum interviewed Erlichman for a book he was writing on the war on drugs. Erlichman’s revelations were feature in the April cover story of Harper’s:
‘You want to know what this was really all about,’ Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. ‘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.’
But the Harper’s story isn’t going unchallenged. “(I) have never heard or seen that quote before, and it surely was not policy in the Nixon White House, where concern about what drugs were doing to our country, especially to young people, was universal,” former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan told Red Alert Politics.
The Congressional Black Caucus, founded by Rep. [crscore]Charles Rangel[/crscore] among others, was also strongly in favor of escalating the drug war, viewing narcotics as one of the principal sources of damage to the black community.
From the time Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971, he received widespread support from the Democratic Congress. Erlichman’s comments may be greeted with further skepticism considering Nixon’s administration adopted affirmative action as official government policy.
Erlichman’s controversial comments sparked howls of outrage from pro-drug legalization groups who have argued over decades that the drug war has a disproportionate impact on black Americans.
“This explosive admission, while provocative, is sadly nothing new,” the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) said in a press release.
“Our (DPA) allies in the movement to end the drug war have long known that U.S. drug policies and have been inherently racist and discriminatory. Despite comparable rates of drug use and sales, communities of color and other marginalized groups have been the principal targets of drug law enforcement and make up the vast majority of people who have been incarcerated or otherwise had their lives torn apart by the drug war,” read the press release.
The DPA urged world leaders, who will gather in New York in April for the United National General Assembly Special Session on drug policy, to raise the white flag in the war on drugs.
The war on drugs has taken hold across the world but there are few signs of success, with many illegal drugs cheaper and purer than they were several decades ago. (RELATED: DEA Admits Total Failure To Fight Heroin In One Stunning Tweet)
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