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Comment by manicdee | Hacker News Reader

The war on drugs was a highly successful campaign to entrench racism so deep in the American psyche that you will never be rid of it.

The “War on Drugs” was never about drugs.

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> “It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom.”

    -- Bill Hicks

This. Time and time again, drugs and their legal status have far more to do with their most common users.

...except that white people use drugs at roughly the same levels as everyone else, and are the largest proportion of “the most common users”. This is not to invalidate the original post—just be aware of how the perception of drug use has been shaped towards racist ends vs what the data shows. You have to look at usage studies, not arrest reports.

The target for Nixon was hippies and the left in general.

The fact that usage is the same and arrests are different is the whole point - make the drug illegal, arrest only those you want to discriminate. The history and timing of the criminalization of weed, opioids, crack cocaine sentencing, etc all line up with what my post said.

What's the importance of the distinction?

Race plays a huge part, but absolute statements like this are not true. You're underestimating just how strong views against drug abuse of any kind are in this country due to religion or whatever.

The prohibitionist movement had a strong female component and the argument was based around various forms of domestic abuse that were related to workmen being drunk all day. This had overlap with the abolitionist movement. It was not racist in its origin and it was the strongest legal "war on drugs" we ever had.

https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/abolition-wome...

The War on Drugs and the Prohibition are two very separate things. While what you say is true about the Prohibition bringing disparate groups together (Church groups, women's' groups, big tobacco), the War on Drugs was an inherently racist tool invented by the Nixon administration to target hippies and blacks.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...

They can be distinct historical events and still be driven by similar dynamics and precedent.

Nixon's war on drugs worked because it was making arguments that had been made before, and it worked because some people liked it for racial reasons, some liked it for religious reasons, and some overlapped.

Yeah, except that Nixon just gave it that name. Drug prohibition in the US started when Nixon was learning to walk.

This "drug prohibition is about racism" is all post hoc ergo propter hoc stuff.

I am not so sure about that:

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-myth-negro-cocaine-fie...

The War on Drugs is a specific program of racist vilification. I did not make any claim about prohibition.

No it wasn't. The War on Drugs was an attempt to take disparate anti-drug efforts and combine them into a more coherent whole. It was no different from the War on Poverty.

Were there people attempting to use drug policy to attack other people they didn't like? I've no doubt. But that wasn't the purpose of the War on Drugs and it would never have come into existence if it were.

That the religious right have latched onto prohibitionist dogma for centuries is not in question, however your comment doesn't appear to take into account that, at least in the US, said dogma has been spun up specifically to vilify one minority group or another to pander to racists for political gains consistently since the country's founding. Anti-chinese leagues' anti-opium rhetoric circa late 1900's being a prime example.

The "race plays a huge part" does take it into account. The prohibitionists were not just "the religious right", you're applying today's politics to something that's been going on for much longer.

You're not wrong, but it's also not true that the prohibitionists were racists, either. That's the thing about political movements is they often have wide bases of support.

I'm not sure what's controversial about this. Have you guys not been around very religious people who abstain from all drugs but are not racists? There's a lot of those, it's incorrect to act like they don't exist and it's all about racism, because it is not.

History is nuanced, it's not an all or nothing thing. It's almost never just x.

You're exaggerating the case. The biggest prohibitionists circa 1870-1930, were the baptists, who were not motivated by racism at all when it came to prohibition. Rockefeller's baptist circle were the largest funders of prohibition at the time. Rockefeller also did more for black people during that era than any other single individual. The prohibition tie to racism is weak at best, which is to say these contexts differ widely; trying to apply that one cover story to all of them is more than a stretch.

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