Nixon Policy Advisor Admits He Invented War on Drugs to Suppress 'Anti-War
Left and Black People' By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd 22/3/16
Dan Baum, writing in support of drug
legalisation at Harper’s, has unleashed a frank
1994 quote from former Nixon policy advisor
John Ehrlichman, and as inadvertently salient
an argument for legalising drugs as any I have
ever seen:
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.
“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.”
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.
That drugs have been used as a tactic to
marginalise and imprison peoples who are
inconvenient, so to speak, for conservatives
and neo-cons doesn’t really come as a
surprise—and not just because Nixon was a
noted racist. The War on Drugs was a Nixon
invention but, as Baum explains, it’s been
useful for every president thereafter, and its
function as a suppressive tool didn’t exactly
wane—recall the way it defined Reagan’s
crack era, which was funnelled into black
neighbourhoods by the CIA and then used to
decimate an entire generation. Or the way
relatively minor drug offenses are the main
contributor to the current mass incarceration
crisis, which disproportionately affects young
black and brown men.
Adjacent to this, Baum lays out a clear and
logical argument for the way legalisation
could work, using Portugal and the
Netherlands as precedents, and advocating for
it to remain in the control of the state—a
“state-run monopoly”—rather than free
markets, lest addiction become a market
incentive the way it has with alcohol and
cigarettes. (Of course, the deeper problem of
racial prejudice remains strong in this
scenario too—the legal weed market has
already locked out people of colour to a
dramatic and unfair degree, and black people
are much more likely to be arrested for pot-
related offenses even in states where it’s
legal.) Baum cites the way marijuana is
regulated in his home state of Colorado (of
course this dude is from Boulder), but also
makes the case that weed is the path to killing
the drug war, in its capacity as an admitted
racist and antiliberal Nixonian tool:
The citizens of the U.S. jurisdictions that
legalised ma