> 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.

- John Ehrlichman, Domestic Policy Chief for Richard Nixon, in a 1994 Interview for Harpers Magazine[0]

0: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-n...

This is also clearly what happened with psychedelics. When they found out LSD wasn't the truth serum or mind control tool they had hoped it would be, and instead tended to just make people think more like hippies, they put the leg down hard.

The motivation for fictitious wars against bogeymen is to empower and bankroll law enforcement while diminishing the civil rights of citizens.

Like the war on terror, the decades long war on drugs has been a roaring success.

The war on terror and war on drugs are closely related enough (through expansion of powers and economic policies such as allowing police to purchase old military equipment) that I wonder if it’s worth even treating them as separate things.

The war on drugs has a lot more raids in the own territory while the war on terror has more bombings in foreign territory, so for now there are some major differences. However once using predator and reaper drones against citizens without any judicial oversight is normalized, that difference will be gone.

There are quite a few domestic impacts of the war on terror: domestic spying and the USA PATRIOT Act are two huge examples. In the context of "bankroll law enforcement while diminishing the civil rights of citizens" it's nearly identical to the war on drugs domestically.

In terms of domestic spying, it's hard to articulate any practical effect it's had though. People have certainly reacted to it (see the move to TLS everywhere, for example) but I can't actually think of any enforcement actions its linked to. There's almost certainly parallel construction out there, but compared to the war on drugs, which has lead to mandatory minimums, constant police harrassment, no knock warrants, etc, I'd have to concider the war on drugs the higher priority target for fighting.

I should have made my statement more carefully. I agree with you fundamentally; I see them as two heads of one beast, though.

Also to cause fear and panic to unite the population against a common enemy. Fear is the fundamental basis of government and control.

And now we have the War on COVID.

Uh... and how many virii have been illegally imprisoned? I'm not following.

I'm seeing the same happening for covid - governments and police using it as an opportunity to gain more control and power without real justification, only the excuse of "for health safety".

>The motivation for fictitious wars against bogeymen is to empower and bankroll law enforcement while diminishing the civil rights of citizens.

Thank you. This trend where people recast everything in the 20th century to be racially motivated (but can't provide any proof, because it's like complicated) is exhausting.

Just for the record, I wasn't trying to deny the racial element in drug 'warfare', which certainly exists (how deliberately is another matter).

And when people 'recast' things it's sometimes because new evidence emerges, or becomes more well known.

An example of that is in these comments, the interview by former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman made only in 1994, but probably still not that well known until this article from 2016:

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

The war on drugs makes no sense, it should in fact be called the war on some drugs. So called illegal drugs like cocaine and marijuana cause very few deaths, compared to tobacco and alcohol, less than 1% It has been established that the best way to reduce drug abuse is through education and support, this was in fact from a RAND study. The militant policing approach has not in fact reduced drug use in the USA.

> The war on drugs makes no sense, it should in fact be called the war on some drugs.

I prefer the war on some drugs when consumed by some people

That's not "considerable information", that's a known fact.

Adam Conove made a whole episode in his show, "Adam ruins everything", about the true reasons why weed is illegal.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0

Spoiler: it's about giving the government of the US a tool to discriminate black people and mexicans.

I'll have to watch Adam's episode, but I watched a Netflix documentary five years ago (don't recall the name) that presented the argument that it was primarily the (cotton?) industry that lobbied to classify weed as illegal, because they wanted to destroy the hemp industry (and succeeded) as they were producing clothing.

So it sounds like original bad intent (destroy competition) led to it being abused for further bad intent (racism).

I'm going to be honest, the argument that hemp is a generally great material has always seemed weak to me. There are plenty of countries where growing hemp is legal, and it still never seems to get much use.

It historically has had tons of use. It was pretty much the only material used for making rope for centuries in Europe, and was used widely in building construction too. Hemp cultivation was a crucial piece of colonial Virginia’s economy, heavily promoted by the British government, and it was used for clothing, sails, and even fine textiles as far back as the Viking age (eg, https://www.nature.com/articles/srep02686).

I could provide more references but I’m typing with thumbs - they are easy to find, though.

Sorry, should be clearer. It did indeed have historical uses. Not sure if it has much current ones.

As the bootleggers and baptists phenomenon has shown, the drive for prohibition can come from multiple, disparate sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

> There is considerable information back from the 80s to suggest that the US war on drugs was actually a system to enable racial discrimination.

It also was a way to increase the private jails business, which in fact peaked during the 80s, but the racial and political discrimination stands too. The following piece from the Wikipedia article about the War on Drugs is telling.

"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."

— John Ehrlichman (White House Counsel and Domestic Affair advisor during the Nixon administration)

> There is considerable information back from the 80s to suggest that the US war on drugs was actually a system to enable racial discrimination.

I believe it was started as a voter disenfranchisement effort by the Nixon Administration.

> Indeed I provide no references here because it is quite an involved topic and difficult to prove given the publicly available information.

Agreed, as I have none either.

I think that it is hard for younger people (especially young affluent people) to get a sense of how big of a problem drugs can be in society. Even prohibition seems crazy now - but it was popular at the time partly because public drunkenness and abusive husbands were a big deal.

I think the fact that black people are prosecuted at higher rates or the fact that crack is prosecuted harder than cocaine is a sign of racism, but it does bug me when people assign a conspiratorial level of control to the problem. It's a lose-lose, and at least in 2020 we are eon the side of prosecuting things too harshly.

Didn't the war on drugs grow out of prohibition though? It's kind of odd to think that a lot of common drugs were commercially available 150 years ago. One of the most popular soft drinks ever started from that even.

We also got anesthetics from the general availability of drugs. I doubt doctors would've tried using cocaine on patients if it had been illegal back then.

So is the environmental movement in America. It’s no coincidence that the EPA came out of the Nixon administration too. I say this as a huge proponent of the Earth and all of her humans, and I have similarly struggled to prove it to people. It is hermetically sealed.

> There is considerable information ... that the US war on drugs was ... a system to enable racial discrimination.

> I provide no references ... it is ... difficult to prove given the publicly available information

These claims seem to strongly negate each other... to a degree that one detects the putrid scent of conspiracy theory.

Ah, yes, downvoted without responses.

To the downvoters: what would you call a strongly held belief that cannot be supported by documentary evidence; a problem you attribute to a coordinated effort to hide the actors and their intentions? Sounds an awful lot like a theory that there is a conspiracy.