Did you take a second to search AskHistorians about this issue? There's a bunch more stuff like this, not just in the 1970s.
That reductive. Things can happen for multiple reasons.
> Nixon also happened to be racist... But that’s not causation.
Sure it is. If you are racist and you do things that have a racist outcome, it's racism. What kind of mental hoops are you jumping through to get to some other conclusion?
Like the people who defend Eric S Raymond's racist edge lord bullshit because they think he's just trying to show off how clever he is to say manifestly racist shit to provoke people and then trying to talk his way out of it by accusing everyone of being less intelligent and open minded than he is.
That's a sweeping generalization; it's not a rebuttal if the cancers in question have multiple causative factors — as you seem implicitly to acknowledge in your very-next paragraph about "entirely-different reasons" ....
> “Historians” are, as a general matter, terrible at describing why things happen. They’re not data analyzers, they’re story tellers.
Really? "I usually don't agree with historians' explanation of why things happen" is not an acceptable definition of "terrible."
(Oh, and as I'm sure you know professionally: Story-telling is often the best way to communicate a message.)
It’s possible that the drug war is caused by racism in the US, and by entirely different reasons in Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nigeria, Japan, or China, or Russia. But the cited “evidence” hardly suffices to establish that.
“Historians” are, as a general matter, terrible at describing why things happen. They’re not data analyzers, they’re story tellers. The same few anecdotes from people in Nixon’s orbit get spun out to explain a decades-long social phenomenon. But was Nixon in Japan and all those other places that have drug wars?
The drug war happened because America is a rigidly moralistic society, just like Japan, and such societies almost uniformly condemn drug use as a moral failing. Nixon also happened to be racist, and a hallmark of racism is the tendency to attribute immorality and lack of character to out groups. But that’s not causation.