From The NY Daily News:
The infamous decades-long "War on Drugs" was actually a tool for the federal government to crack down on leftist protesters and "black people," a former Nixon White House adviser admitted in an interview published Tuesday.
John Ehrlichman, who served as counsel to former President Richard Nixon, explained the unfortunate use of the controversial policy in a 1994 interview with writer Dan Baum, that he revisited in a new article for Harper's published this week.
"You want to know what this was really all about," Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said after Baum asked him about government policies regarding 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," Ehrlichman continued.
"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," Ehrlichman, who served time in prison stemming from a conviction related to his role in the Watergate scandal, plainly told Baum.
(my bold)
Of course, this posthumous confession only confirms what Progressives have suspected for decades. This shameful 'war’ rages on to this day, what with the incarceration rates for black drug offenders exponentially higher than for white offenders. And of course we remember the recent disparity between sentencing for crack cocaine vs. regular cocaine.
It’s odd that it took 22 years for a quote that could have come from the pages of Duh! Magazine to surface, but it’s satisfying nonetheless.