John Erlichman, Nixon’S right hand man in an interview with Dan Baum, author of the book Smoke and Mirrors said “The Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or to be black. But by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily we could disrupt those communities. We could raid their homes, break up their meetings, vilify them every night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This is why Nixon started the drug war, not for any humanitarian reasons, but for purely political and racists reasons and it needs to stop by ending the lies then ending destructive and extremely expensive war on drugs and dismantling the DEA. Another positive side effect of ending the drug war would be we could stop the legal theft called civil asset forfeiture which was supposed to be just to seize the assets of drug dealers but many law enforcement agencies nationwide have used it instead to steal the property of average citizens. We ma y have a real problem trying to get rid of it now since the Republicans in the Senate decided to take part of the money from this program from the DOJ to help pay for the new budget they passed last year, since they wanted to include another whopping tax cut for Wall Street. Then on local news last night here in my State they talked about asset forfeiture, leaving the civil part out of course and how the budget for my State’s drug enforcement would be slashed but didn’t explain why. Said that we received almost $81 million over the past decade, I believe and that’s just in one state. This is yet another law that violates the Constitution but I highly doubt anyone in DC even reads it these days, except they seem to study the one sentence of the 2nd Amendment constantly. Then there would be all the savings from fewer people in prison, for which the spending outpaces that of education in this country. For the cost of incarcerating one person we could have sent them to Harvard. Think of all the good we could do for this country were it not for all the money spent on the failed drug war that actually has done way more harm then good. Problem is now we’ve got way too many people profiting off it so it will be extremely difficult to do away with. So, people, it’s not those brown, black, yellow, Muslim, Jew, woman, gay person or whatever causing you headaches it’s your damned government, mainly those Republicans on the hard right doing the bidding of the billionaires, mainly the Koch’s along with some assistance from the conservadems/blue dogs and/or corporate 3rd way democrats.