Dan Baum, writing in support of drug legalization at Harper’s, has unleashed a frank 1994 quote from former Nixon policy advisor John Ehrlichman, and as inadvertently salient an argument for legalizing drugs as any I’ve ever seen:JezebelAt 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.”
Nixon Policy Advisor Admits He Invented War On Drugs to Suppress 'Anti-War Left and Black People'
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
In the West, the drug war has always been a class war.
ReplyDeleteDrugs are outlawed or legalized according to oligarch wishes.
For example, when the opioid epidemic took off, the Drug Enforcement Administration wanted to stop it. However there was so much money to be made from opioid addiction that the US congress checkmated the DEA by unanimously passing the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, which Obama signed into law on 19 April 2016.
The Act prevents the DEA from stopping the opioid epidemic.
One of the co-sponsors was Sen. Marco Rubio, who now wants to bring “democracy” (i.e. famine) to Venezuela.
It's quite a mystery of how under "capitalism", people are not safe in their private real or personal property or able to engage in free market exchanges. It's such a mystery.
ReplyDeleteHere is a question for RODDIS the Racist: if libertarianism is so fantastic, why aren't there any libertarian governments?
ReplyDeleteHere is another: why are social democracies rated the happiest countries year in and year out?