> Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “War on Drugs” in 1971 and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues.
> [Ehrlichman, Nixon’s advisor for domestic affairs] “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 blacks, 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.”
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-st...
The congressional black caucus were ardent supporters of the war on drugs https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio...
So I'm pretty sure that whatever motivation Nixon had, the Black community in the United States wasn't a big fan of drugs and wanted them gone.
That is difficult to square with Nixonian plot to use the carceral apparatus to keep Black people from gaining power.
I guess it does track with revisionism to make anything we currently disagree with to be a product of original sin.
“nearly every major Black abolitionist and civil rights leader before World War I—from Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth to F.E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington—endorsed temperance and prohibition.”
Hardly the group I would associate with oppressing minorities.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/06/forgotten-...
Not everyone who is white today was white 100 years ago.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prohibition+anti+immigrant
Take your pick.
The other thing I'd like to just bring up is that the either/or between criminalising/not criminalising drugs can sometimes miss that there are many creative, diverse and humanising responses to problematic drug use that don't depend on control via the threat of punishment
The initial goal of drug laws may be in the vein of stabilizing society, while poor implementation strays from that goal. Both can be true at the same time. Poor implementation begs for better implementation, not the nullification of the goal. I am not defending current drug policies, I'm guarding against the notion that the "solution" is just to make consensual crime legal.
This side-steps a relevant discussion about how you measure societal stability, but that would be a long digression to itself.