[lbo-talk] John Ehrlichman: War on Drugs launched to target Nixon's "two enemies: the antiwar left and black people"

[Joseph Catron]

"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."

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all

-- 
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure
mægen lytlað."