Legalize it all. How to Win the War on Drugs
"In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me
one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the
United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has
yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been
criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium
law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared
the first 'war on drugs' and set the country on the wildly punitive and
counterproductive path it still pursues.
...I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he
impatiently waved away. 'You want to know what this was really all
about?' he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace
and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. '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? 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.'”
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