Then some years later, the ear on drugs became associated with the growth of the private prison industry and it's lobbyists.
Indeed I provide no references here because it is quite an involved topic and difficult to prove given the publicly available information.
- John Ehrlichman, Domestic Policy Chief for Richard Nixon, in a 1994 Interview for Harpers Magazine[0]
0: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-n...
Like the war on terror, the decades long war on drugs has been a roaring success.
Thank you. This trend where people recast everything in the 20th century to be racially motivated (but can't provide any proof, because it's like complicated) is exhausting.
And when people 'recast' things it's sometimes because new evidence emerges, or becomes more well known.
An example of that is in these comments, the interview by former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman made only in 1994, but probably still not that well known until this article from 2016:
I prefer the war on some drugs when consumed by some people
Adam Conove made a whole episode in his show, "Adam ruins everything", about the true reasons why weed is illegal.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0
Spoiler: it's about giving the government of the US a tool to discriminate black people and mexicans.
So it sounds like original bad intent (destroy competition) led to it being abused for further bad intent (racism).
I could provide more references but I’m typing with thumbs - they are easy to find, though.
It also was a way to increase the private jails business, which in fact peaked during the 80s, but the racial and political discrimination stands too. The following piece from the Wikipedia article about the War on Drugs is telling.
"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."
— John Ehrlichman (White House Counsel and Domestic Affair advisor during the Nixon administration)
I believe it was started as a voter disenfranchisement effort by the Nixon Administration.
> Indeed I provide no references here because it is quite an involved topic and difficult to prove given the publicly available information.
Agreed, as I have none either.
I think the fact that black people are prosecuted at higher rates or the fact that crack is prosecuted harder than cocaine is a sign of racism, but it does bug me when people assign a conspiratorial level of control to the problem. It's a lose-lose, and at least in 2020 we are eon the side of prosecuting things too harshly.
We also got anesthetics from the general availability of drugs. I doubt doctors would've tried using cocaine on patients if it had been illegal back then.
> I provide no references ... it is ... difficult to prove given the publicly available information
These claims seem to strongly negate each other... to a degree that one detects the putrid scent of conspiracy theory.
To the downvoters: what would you call a strongly held belief that cannot be supported by documentary evidence; a problem you attribute to a coordinated effort to hide the actors and their intentions? Sounds an awful lot like a theory that there is a conspiracy.