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/