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Comment by anitil | Hacker News Reader

I've heard versions of the war on drugs as a veiled racial policy [0]. But, I'm not from the US, and that idea seems too ... convenient (?) so I wouldn't take it at face value.

[0] See https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman for the direct quote

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> 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 [0].

For context, that's a direct quote from John Ehrlichman who "was counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs" under Nixon when Nixon declared the war on drugs. Everything kind of snow-balled from there.

According to the chronology provided by PBS [1], perhaps the first groundwork was put in place by LBJ founding the "Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs" in 1968 (campaign year that Nixon won), the timing of which correlates with Nixon's successful campaigning on a "theme to restore 'law and order'"[2].

[0] https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/cron/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidentia...

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