The War On Drugs' Horribly Racist Origins Have Finally Been Revealed
By
Zak Cheney-RiceMarch 23, 2016
A former adviser to President Richard Nixon said the war on drugs was invented to criminalize black people and suppress the radical left, according to an article published by
Harper's.
Richard M. Nixon, 1974
Source:
Keystone-France/Getty Images
Dan Baum, a
Harper'scontributor and former staff writer for the
New Yorker, recalled a conversation he had in 1994 with former adviser to the president for domestic affairs John Ehrlichman, who served
18 monthsin federal prison for perjury charges stemming from the Watergate scandal.
Here's Ehrlichman's damning admission to Baum, via
Harper's:
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "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."
I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged
. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company
, and led me to the door.
John Ehrlichman, former adviser to the president for domestic affairs
Source:
Mic/AP
So there you have it.The online version of Baum's article, "
Legalize It All," drove so much traffic on Tuesday it caused the
Harper'swebsite to crash temporarily:
We broke the internet with our April story on legalizing drugs, when we come down we'll fix it.
declared drugs "public enemy No. 1," a brutal crackdown on narcotics use, possession and distribution has ushered in an era of mass criminalization, which has disproportionately impacted black people.
Over the course of the drug war, possession of substances like crack cocaine, which devastated black neighborhoods in the 1980s, held much
harsherpenalties than those for cocaine, a similar substancemore commonly associated with white users.
Former US President George H.W. Bush posing with baggies of cocaine in 1989.
Source:
Dennis Cook/AP
In 2010 black people were almost four times as likely to be arrested for
marijuana possession as white people, according to the
American Civil Liberties Union. Even today in Colorado and Washington — states where recreational marijuana use is now legal — black marijuana arrest rates are still
higher than everyone else's.
Michelle Alexander outlined how the drug war was originally designed as a form of social control in her book
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.During the 1960s and 1970s, "[as] factories closed, jobs were shipped overseas, deindustrialization and globalization led to depression in inner-city communities nationwide, and crime rates began to rise," Alexander told
Frontline.
"And as they rose and the backlash against the civil rights movement reached a fever pitch, the get-tough movement exploded into a zeal for incarceration, and a war on drugs was declared," she explained.
What stands out about Ehrlichman's reported admission is how blunt and straightforward it is. Perhaps now Americans can have a more open conversation around what this "war" has really been about.