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takyon (881)
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A Former Nixon Aide Admitted the 'War on Drugs' Was Designed to Screw Over Blacks and Hippies
According to Watergate mastermind and former Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the then-president launched the notorious (and ongoing) war on drugs in 1971 to disrupt that administration's two greatest perceived threats: black people and antiwar leftists.
The brazen quote surfaced in the April cover story of Harper's magazine that was written by Dan Baum and went online Tuesday. The reporter recalls an interview back in 1994 in which Ehrlichman bluntly explained the whole thing.
"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 told Baum. "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."
Obvious? Sure. But it's important to get this kind of history explicitly out in the open so that mistakes can be corrected.
Here's the article at Harper's Magazine.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Wednesday March 23 2016, @10:41AM
This is very interesting.
I enjoy your stream, thanks for the ongoing dedication.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 23 2016, @11:04AM
On the journal, I keep it spicy.
Try my extension.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 23 2016, @11:59AM
I think this would've made a great submission (and the cue is short). While it might agitate people, it's entirely fact based.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 23 2016, @09:22PM
It's a bit spicy for the front page, but I think I will run it as part of a 4/20 megapost, which will mostly consist of news that happened in the year following the last post.
So if you have any links for specific, important drug-related stories from April 2015 to now, feel free to link them to me.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Wednesday March 23 2016, @04:20PM
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday March 23 2016, @10:33PM
Short term loss of life, liberty, property, sanctity... short term meaning many decades.
We already know which drugs shouldn't be on Schedule I (most of them), and yet it still persists. It's like a never-ending nightmare.
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