In
1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me
one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the
United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has
yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been
criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium
law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared
the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and
counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had
been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in
Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely
recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the
Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard
that extended to the middle of his chest.
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.”
Read the rest here.
HT: MG
The Gospel Preached to the Patriarch Abraham
6 hours ago
1 comment:
I apply the same logic to drugs as to abortion. We ask the wrong question when we ask should the government make illegal such activities. Of course they should, but this is only secondary. The greater question is WHAT is wrong with our culture when such things become commonplace? Why is their no shame in drug use and abortion?
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