The War on Drugs was never about drugs. It was always about breaking up families and jailing minorities and leftists. Why would they hurry up to legalize it when it's a great source of revenue though the legal system?
Possible, but unlikely. It's a shameful legacy that disproportionately affected minorities, but it's unlikely the original Nixon war on drugs was a direct assault on hippies and Blacks. More likely, Nixon was simply terrified of drugs [0] and overreacted and this bad policy was extended by future presidents for decades. The canard about targeting specific demographics originates with John Ehrlichman in a 2016 Harper's story [1]. Ehrichman had a real grudge for doing jail time for Watergate. Nixon's own drug czar, Jerome Jaffe, is somewhat of a pioneer in non-retributive, therapeutic treatments [2].
[0] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/intervie...
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
[2] https://mashable.com/article/nixon-war-on-drugs#uqUHc3dQzuqZ
Note that that is a story relating an interview in 1994, which you've copied off of a Wikipedia page and apparently misunderstood. But that still kind of fails to explain how I knew about Nixon's War on Drugs targeting blacks and hippies back in ~1991.
Also, why did Nixon "just hate drugs"? Was it because of the association with blacks and hippies?
And why did his administration support his efforts? When considering the motivations behind policies we shouldn't fall victim of explanations that revolve entirely around cults of personality. Even if Nixon didn't support it for racist and anti-leftist reasons, he still needed the support of his administration, and the application of the war on drugs could have still been racist and anti-leftist due to the actions of the many thousands of people who had to prosecute it.
That's an ad hominem and should be irrelevant to the argument.
He didn't though.
Absolutely agree. Adding to this the most naturally powerful and deadly drugs on earth grow in just about every field in most of the northern United States and in parts of northern Europe. Those other weeds are not and have never been illegal nor could they practically be made illegal as they are near impossible to get rid of. Singling out marijuana AFAIK was initially about stopping competition in the paper industry and the system never corrected itself when it started feeding the prison industrial complex and allowing cops to lock up specific groups of people they disliked and justifying bigger budgets and entirely new agencies to be created.
I do not have any good ideas for how to fix this. Maybe replace MJ with the more deadly stuff until the system implodes under its own weight whilst accepting the casualties? Henbane may be safer than eating tide pods.