ST
SteveOriginal Poster
Mar 23, 2016A 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:]
http://mashable.com/2016/03/22/nixon-war-on-drugs/#13rptzyo9uqC
"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:]
http://mashable.com/2016/03/22/nixon-war-on-drugs/#13rptzyo9uqC
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