A bit of history: The War on Drugs

A recently-publicized quote from Richard Nixon's top
domestic-policy advisor John Erlichman, regarding the War on
Drugs:

"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,? Ehrlichman continued.

"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."

It's an open question, of course, whether the "we" who developed
this political strategy included the President (this Mashable post
thinks not.) What's clear, though, is that it DID work,
politically, and did not work as a matter of public health.
[link tool's not working - here it is:]
https://mashable.com/2016/03/22/nixon-war-on-drugs/#13rptzyo9uqC

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