Richard Nixon used America's 'war on drugs' as excuse to target ‘anti-war left and black people,'

[Judi Lynn]

Richard Nixon used America's 'war on drugs' as excuse to target ‘anti-war left and black people,’ claims former aide

The civil rights leader, Rev Al Sharpton, said that John Ehrlichman’s remarks were ‘a frightening confirmation of what many of us have been saying for years’

Tim Walker US Correspondent |
@timwalker |
Wednesday 23 March 2016


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John Erlichman served 18 months for his role in the Watergate scandal Wikimedia/Creative Commons
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America’s so-called “war on drugs” began as little more than a ploy to enable Richard Nixon to go after his political enemies, one of the disgraced President’s former policy gurus admitted in an interview which has surfaced for the first time.

John Ehrlichman, who had advised Nixon on domestic policy, told the journalist Dan Baum that the drugs war was an excuse to target “the anti-war left and black people”, Mr Baum writes, in a new report advocating drug legalisation for Harper’s Magazine.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people,” Mr Ehrlichman said in the 1994 interview.

“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 criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/richard-nixon-used-america-s-war-on-drugs-as-excuse-to-target-anti-war-left-and-black-people-claims-a6948521.html

[rusty quoin]

1. And it is a politics as usual.

Find a way to divide the electorate so that the very powerful can run roughshod over the whole process. I really wish more people were in tune with what is going on.

[bvf]

2. The evil genius of it is that

they managed to turn it into a fucking industry, to boot.

[haikugal]

3. They have made millions off us and still it goes on.

[Peace Patriot]

4. And the Clintons picked right up on that and made it far, far worse...

...with draconian sentencing, militarization of police departments and establishment of a private prison industry profiting off high incarceration levels (private prisons that donate to Hillary Clinton)--a fetid disaster that stinks up the whole country, with urine tests everywhere you turn--the invasion of peoples bodies seeking out drugs-- fear, confiscation of property on mere accusation (NOT conviction), ruination of millions of peoples' lives and families and communities, disbarment from voting, disbarment from school aid or any federal program, disbarment from jobs--all the wreckage and ruin of the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs," here and abroad.

The disbarment from voting rights, often for life, is something that really bothers me, for it treats prisoners like dogs who can never regain full human status in their communities. And there is something else about it that is just awful:

African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately arrested and convicted for mere possession of drugs--offenses that well-off white people generally don't go to jail for. And there are hundreds of other excuses to imprison blacks and browns in disproportionate numbers, for non-violent crimes. Then, while the prisoners are debarred from voting, they are often taken far, far from their communities to prisons in white, rural areas, where THEIR BODIES ARE COUNTED IN THE U.S. CENSUS as belonging to those communities, to invest the sparsely populated white rural communities with more political representation than they merit, and with more federal project dollars than they are entitled to.

Meanwhile, those prisoners are absent from their own communities as counted citizens, reducing the political power and the federal dollars that their communities would gain by their presence. They can't vote in either place, and may never be able to vote again. And yet they are used to contribute to the unmerited power of the communities in which the prison resides.

Thank you, Bill and Hillary Clinton, for the highest imprisonment rate on earth, for the disgusting racism and deprivation of rights that the "war on drugs" has been used to inflict, for smashing down communities all over this country with that and with "free trade for the rich," and for honoring the No. 2 worst president in our history, after Bush Jr., by expanding Nixon's "war on drugs" and sticking the knife into our poorest people.

Oh, and thank you, Hillary Clinton, for honoring the No. 1 worst president in U.S. history by voting for, and enthusiastically supporting, his bloody slaughter in Iraq.

Did I say not? NOT!

[cprise]

5. K&R