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 Franciscoās anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichmanās boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first āwar on drugsā and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. Iād tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixonās domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than heād been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. āYou want to know what this was really all about?ā he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. āThe Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what Iām saying? We knew we couldnāt 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.ā
I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.
Nixonās invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since ā Democrat and Republican alike ā has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesnāt end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction.
iām going to just leave this right here and reblog it a few times until i think yāall understand the weight of this.Ā
germansingergirl
dailybridgerton
andulkaphoto
gummygunk
stormborns
theartofmadeline
gracieabrams
