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I think you're being both too cynical and not cynical enough here, in that the more important causes are stupider and more petty than you're making out.

Nixon did very much like that he was screwing over black people and hippies with the war on drugs but the main reason he pursued this was that rising crime rates were freaking out voters. They wanted to vote for people with a plan to fix this but crime was mostly a state and local issue. By claiming that cracking down on drugs would solve crime Nixon was able to claim that he had a solution to crime.

But the reason we have such weird laws about marijuana in particular is that "marijuana induced insanity" was a popular criminal defense in some places prior to criminalization and that led most people at the time to think of marijuana primarily in terms of inducing violent crime.

> It is about locking up poor people in order to keep them from voting.

Poor people already don't vote in high numbers.

> It is about filling our prisons with non-violent offenders so we can force them to work for slave wages, and line the owners of the prisons and the politicians they fund's pockets.

That's part of it, but private prisons hold a small minority of the prison population.

> It's about political suppression, not about some moralistic crusade to protect people from drugs.

It's about political suppression, but also about perceptions that "only bad people smoke" etc etc. Maybe the leaders are fully malevolent in their intentions, but they get their support from the populace who they misled about the drug problem in the first place.

A lot of people really believe that marijuana is some horrible substance that will ruin you. My dad was one of those people and I believed him until I tried it in my 20’s and saw that it’s a vice akin to drinking at its worst, and often very positive.

I think some people had hidden racist or imperialist intentions and so found what they could hate about blacks and hippies and spread the lies. (Edit: obviously overt racist intentions have affected minorities forever.) I assume much of it was malicious and conscious and much was genuine belief that came from horrible racism. Then those people made television shows and news stories about how marijuana makes you dumb (conveniently diffusing any intellectual currency hippies had). People like my dad saw the propaganda and believed it wholeheartedly, and then I did too. So far removed from the 1950’s shows like Dragnet that laid it on thick, and having grown up in a different place full of friendly pot smoking hippies, I had a different experience and saw the lies for what they were.

But propaganda is started by those who want influence and believed by those who are unable to see through the lies.

> My dad was one of those people and I believed him until I tried it in my 20’s and saw that it’s a vice akin to drinking at its worst, and often very positive.

Not the whole truth, as there are known rare side effects that are significantly detrimental. In my experience it also seems harder/rarer to be a high functioning regular user. But yeah.

If I do accept that position though - I'm not sold the argument is in favour of anything but prohibition

I’m sure the same would be said of alcohol. For either - what good has prohibition ever done for us?

Tobacco and Alcohol being legal whilst we've criminalised weed/amphetamines/cocaine doesn't make much sense to me. The arbitrary lines are clearly spurious and historical.

I'm broadly in favour of selling every single drug to the public without need of a prescription, let people do whatever the fuck they want and live with the consequences (but there will be societal consequences too). Mostly I just long for consistency

The most recent Jon Oliver[0] was on this topic. Disenfranchising people was one of the main reasons for the prohibition:

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpPyLcQ2vdI

Sure maybe the Nixon campaign/administration used laws that were on the books to target certain groups...but the laws already existed for more than a generation.

Similarly, private for profit prisons, while they existed earlier, weren’t really a thing (as we know them today) until the 1980’s.

So the idea drug laws were created as a weapon against hippies and blacks (30 years in advance) or to line pockets of prison owners (50 years before the true for profit prison system) seems off. Even political suppression, women just got the right to vote, blacks were already actively being suppressed from voting by Law when marijuana prohibition laws were created (and continued to be until the civil rights movement and the voting rights act of 1965).

Right, while the above are all disgusting side effects of the shitty implementation of American drug law, I think good old fashioned American Puritanism is to blame for the original targeting.

Wasn't it the cotton industry lobbying against industrial hemp?

Exactly follow the money. At the time of the federal marijuana stamp tax act, a flood of propaganda was distributed through the media including infamous propaganda films (such as Reefer Madness). The word hemp was never used or uttered, instead the Mexican slang Marihuana. This was done to confuse the public who never would have outlawed hemp (after all it was a crop the founding fathers grew and the US government accepted as a form of tax payment).

Looking back on the propaganda people do come to the more in your face conclusion it was about anti-Mexican immigration, but that was just a catalyst for the for winning the PR war and muddying the waters, as the American public already had medicine cabinets full of cannabis tinctures and a positive history with hemp.

If you think US drug laws are bad, look at Asia. Societies often have disproportionately harsh taboos on certain substances while being totally fine with others.

Did the Puritans distinguish between cannabis and alcohol?

Not at all.

There's only one good reason; Psychedelics make people question their existence and therefore, their social situation as well. The dictators don't like that.

Non-psychedelic drugs like opiates are banned to keep people in the mountains from defending their lands using opium money. I know, iv seen it done.

The TV series Ozark depicts this.

I cant find this interview anywhere. I only see the far left leaning media sites reporting on it. No evidence this statement was actually made by John Ehrlichman. Do you have any?

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

His children dispute the claim, if that helps you, according the the CNN article. The man died in 1999 and it was reported years later.

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2016/03/23/nixons-d...

CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

The Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/richard-ni...

Channel4: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-war-drugs-...

These were all in the first page of Google results with the query 'John Ehrlichman quote drug law'.

But where is the interview???

I dont trust any of these sources.

You believe Forbes is falsifying news whole-cloth?

Three of these sources link to it: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

In the future, before asking for sources, please tell people your whitelist of valid sources.

Otherwise, you're just rudely wasting people's time.