Julianne Escobedo Shepherd — Nixon Policy Advisor Admits He Invented War On Drugs to Suppress 'Anti-War Left and Black People'

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:

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.”

Jezebel
Nixon Policy Advisor Admits He Invented War On Drugs to Suppress 'Anti-War Left and Black People'
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Carol Anderson — Trump Exposes the GOP's Dirty Secret: They Build Everything by Nurturing White Rage

America's soft fascism disguised by code words is now out in the open.

Shortly before he died, Reagan’s strategist Lee Atwater explained the game plan of the Southern Strategy in a matter-of-fact clinical policy. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘n***r’ — that hurts you, backfires,” Atwater emphasized. “So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.” But Donald Trump doesn’t do abstract and that is what has sent the GOP into a tizzy.

Nixon and Reagan mastered this by adapting to the new racial terrain carved out by the Civil Rights Movement. As Nixon aide John Ehrlichman explained to Harper’sDan Baum in 1994, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be against black[s], but by getting the public to associate . . . blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing” the drug “we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “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.”

But that lie was infinitely effective in driving policy. In 2008, the NAACP reported that “five times as many whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites.” Consequently, blacks comprising just 13 percent of the U.S. population made up “59% of those in state prison for a drug offense.” Packaged and sold as keeping neighborhoods and families safe, the Nixon administration’s well-targeted lie, which was expanded upon by Ronald Reagan, and taken up by Democrats such as Bill Clinton to prove that they could be “tough on crime, too,” has worked masterfully. Because many states disfranchise those with felony convictions, the Sentencing Project reports that 2.2 million African Americans or 7.7 percent of black adults have been legally stripped of their voting rights; as compared with 1.8 percent of the non-African American population.…

And that’s the problem. What the GOP is really mad about is that Donald Trump has made visible what many have tried so hard to hide.AlterNet

Trump Exposes the GOP's Dirty Secret: They Build Everything by Nurturing White Rage
Carol Anderson

See also

Back when Dick Cheney was being hailed for calling out Donald Trump’s racism, I notedone aspect of that radio interview that largely escaped notice: his embrace of the myth that the American continent was empty when his Puritan ancestors got here.

Cheney didn’t stop there. He then emphasized that one of his ancestors arrived as a religious refugee, a Puritan. “A lot of people, my ancestors got here, because they were Puritans.” Cheney suggested, then, that the place was empty when William Cheney arrived in the 17th century. “There wasn’t anybody here, then, when they came.”

Should be "the myth of (white) American exceptionalism."

empty wheel Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney, and American Exceptionalism

Carey Wedler — Nixon Advisor Admitted War on Drugs Invented to Crush Anti-War and Black Movements

In 1994, a former Nixon policy adviser admitted the War on Drugs was waged not to keep Americans safe, but to crush dissent. According to John Ehrlichman, who served time in prison for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, the Drug War was intended to disempower anti-war and black rights movements in the 1970s.

Author Dan Baum wrote in the April edition of Harper’s Magazine that in 1994, he spoke with now-deceased Ehrlichman, who frankly explained why President Nixon pushed prohibition:

“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.”…

And therein lies one of the most powerful, lesser-known reasons for prohibition: it is a heavy-handed tactic to silence dissent.

Whether the government’s effort was a pointed strategy to demonize counterculture and anti-authoritarian thought itself — or simply to suppress the movements that harbored them — is unclear. Regardless, Ehrlichman’s admission clarifies the increasingly evident reality that the Drug War was never about keeping people safe.…

Anti-War Media
Nixon Advisor Admitted War on Drugs Invented to Crush Anti-War and Black Movements
Carey Wedler

Zaid Jilani — The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State

The shameful complicity of Democratic leaders in creating our out-of-control, militarized police forces.

Remember when Democrats were accused of being "soft on crime"? Remember "law and order Democrats" as part of triangulation?

This is a story that begins when Bill Clinton embraced the law-and-order policies of his Republican predecessors.

The war on drugs morphed into a race war on non-whites, chiefly Blacks and Hispanics.

Clinton was a “New Democrat” – part of a new coalition of Democrats who believed that the liberalism represented by the New Deal and Great Society had run its course, and that Democrats must court Big Business and certain right-wing interest groups in order to forge a new party. 

Included in this policy shift were things like “welfare reform,” the North American Free Trade Agreement, and deregulation of the telecommunications and banking industries. But perhaps Clinton's earliest and most intense shifting of traditional Democratic Party liberalism was with respect to crime. This took the form of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (later commonly known as the crime bill). To helm its passage, Clinton tapped none other than our current vice president, then Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.…

AlterNet

The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State
Zaid Jilani

Diane Goldstein — Take It From a Cop: The Drug War Poisons Community Policing

The Ferguson riots are the latest high-profile example of the deep schism between American law enforcement and the communities it serves. This schism has been made demonstrably worse by the way the drug war has blurred the police mission. The community policing mission should always be fundamentally different to that of the military—yet that often hasn’t been the case, thanks in large part to wrongheaded policies put in place decades ago. 

The long history of racial disparity in the enforcement of our drug policies was greatly exacerbated by the architect of the modern war on drugs, Richard Nixon. His vision was to create a crime- and violence-free society—but his false belief was that black heroin addicts were the primary cause of crime in our communities. 

Nixon once stated to his aide H.R. Haldeman, “you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” 

Nixon’s dream of devising a criminal justice system that targets communities of color through the mechanism of our drug policies was achieved. According to the ACLU report “ War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” among myriad other sources, law enforcement’s attempt to eradicate drug use in America has hit communities of color the hardest.…

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) speaker and retired police chief Dr. Joseph McNamara once noted the effect of war language on law enforcement professionals: 

“When you’re telling cops that they’re soldiers in a Drug War, you’re destroying the whole concept of the citizen peace officer, a peace officer whose fundamental duty is to protect life and be a community servant. General Colin Powell told us during the Persian Gulf War what a soldier’s duty is. It’s to kill the enemy. And when we allowed our politicians to push cops into a war that they’ll never win, they can’t win, and let them begin to think of themselves as soldiers, the mentality comes that anything goes.”

AlterNet
Take It From a Cop: The Drug War Poisons Community Policing
Diane Goldstein | Substance.com
Then it was a short step to criminalizing dissent, which Nixon also attempted to do at the time of the Vietnam anti-war movement, especially after the bombing of Cambodia and the mass protests that followed. Of course, 9/ll and the Global War on Terror greatly amplified that.

See also Mike Konczal, Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit: The Neoconservative Origins of Our Police Problem, at Rortybomb.

Before it was anything else, the neoconservative movement was a theory of the urban crisis. As a reaction to the urban riots of the 1960s, it put an ideological and social-scientific veneer on a doctrine that called for overwhelming force against minor infractions -- a doctrine that is still with us today, as people are killed for walking down the street in Ferguson and allegedly selling single cigarettes in New York. But neoconservatives also sought, rather successfully, to position liberalism itself as the cause of the urban crisis, solvable only through the reassertion of order through the market and the police.… 

As James Q. Wilson explained in the 1982 Atlantic Monthly article that popularized the topic, “the police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community.” 

Before the modern liberal state of accountability and due process, the police force wasn't judged by “its compliance with appropriate procedures” but instead by its success in maintaining order. Since the 1960s, “the shift of police from order maintenance to law enforcement has brought them increasingly under the influence of legal restrictions… The order maintenance functions of the police are now governed by rules developed to control police relations with suspected criminals,” writes Wilson. According to this theory, order is preserved by the police out there, acting in the moment against minor infractions with a strong display of force, not by liberal notions of accountability and fairness.  

This neoconservative vision that started in the 1960s and continues into today doesn’t just inform local arguments about policing, but rather the entire policy debate. So much of the debate over the (neo)conservative movement emphasizes suburban warriors, or evangelicals, or the Sun Belt, or the South. But as Alice O’Connor demonstrates in her paper "The Privatized City: The Manhattan Institute, the Urban Crisis, and the Conservative Counterrevolution in New York," there was a distinct urban character to this thinking as well. Rather than a crisis of race relations, police violence, poverty, or anything else, rioting and the broader urban crisis were framed by the neoconservative movement as a crisis of values and culture precipitated by liberalism.

The broader urban crisis, in this story, hinges not on structural issues but on personal morality and behavior that can be restored by the extension of the market. Crime and urban “disorder” fit right next to social engineering and failing state institutions as a corrupt legacy of the liberal project and its bureaucratic, administrative governing state. Only the conservative agenda, as O'Connor puts it, of “zero-tolerance law enforcement, school ‘choice,’ hard-nosed implementation of welfare reform, and the large-scale privatization of municipal and social services” is capable of dismantling it. Only through the market, individual responsibility, and freedom from government “interference” can order result from the restoration of “political and cultural authority to a resolutely anti-liberal elite.” This legacy harnesses police excess to the triumph of the market. And as we see, it will be hard to dislodge one while the other reigns supreme.

You suspected that drug prohibition was racist, but you didn't suspect how much

Asians? Check.
Blacks? Check.
Latinos? Check.

AlterNet
Retired Judge Reveals the Surprising Rationale for America's Extremist Drug Laws
Frederic Block, formerly a federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton

And don't forget that the war on drugs spawned the private prison industry. Over two-thirds of those incarcerated for drug offenses are non-white.

Gary S. Becker and Gary S. Becker — Have We Lost the War on Drugs?

After more than four decades of a failed experiment, the human cost has become too high. It is time to consider the decriminalization of drug use and the drug market.

Wall Street Journal
Have We Lost the War on Drugs?
Gary S. Becker, Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago (awarded Nobel Prize in economics in 1992), and Kevin M. Murphy, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Both are senior fellows of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
(h/t Ed Rombach in a comment at The Center of the Universe)

Even the arch-conservative Hoover Institute (and Wall Street Journal) is taking sense about this issue now. It's long past time to recall the lesson of Prohibition. And that involved repeal of a constitutional amendment. Fixing this self-created problem today is much simpler.

Yves Smith — Banks Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of “Terrorist” Occupy Wall Street

The peculiar part of this overreaction is it says that banks and government officials see peaceful protests as a threat to their hold on power. It’s odd that they see their position as precarious, unless they have convinced themselves of their vulnerability as an excuse for clamping down even harder on the rest of us.

Naked Capitalism
Banks Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of “Terrorist” Occupy Wall Street
Yves Smith

The same can be said of the hugely disproportional reaction of the US Establishment to 9/11, which continues into the present, depriving US citizens of civil liberties and constitutionally guaranteed rights in the name of an amorphous and ill-defined "Global War on Terror."

This also brings up the disproportional reaction to possession and trafficking of illegal drugs under the rubric, "War on Drugs" that has resulted in a disproportional swelling of the US prison population and the expansion of a privately owned and operated prison industry at government expense.

This is exactly what the Founding Fathers drafted the US Constitution and Bill of Rights to prevent being repeated in America.

And no, I don't buy the Rothbardian-Libertarian argument that this is all the predictable result of "Keynesianism" and that all we need to do to fix this morass is privatize the monetary system and get government out of the way.

Meanwhile, the TBTF (to big to fail) bankers are now found to be TBTJ (to big to jail).

This is a constitutional crisis rocking the very foundations of the nation and threatening the Great Experiment with failure. The nation needs the leadership of a constitutional lawyer. Oh, wait!

Allan Badiner — The Healing Power of Marijuana Has Barely Been Tapped

Short summary of historical use in traditional healing arts and current medical research. Not only are we forgoing a promising therapeutic tool but also creating a social, political, and economic nightmare over prohibition.

Did we learn nothing from the previous failed attempt at Prohibition, which largely served to scale up organized crime. Hugely inefficient and wasteful, which is a manifestation of institutionalized moronic behavior .

AlterNet
The Healing Power of Marijuana Has Barely Been Tapped
Allan Badiner

Stephen C. Webster — Drug war’s racial disparity moves NAACP to embrace marijuana legalization

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the nation’s oldest civil rights groups, said at its Colorado-Montana-Wyoming state conference on Thursday that its members support Colorado’s marijuana legalization ballot initiative.

“We are committed to changing policies that result in a disproportionate number of African-Americans and other people of color being introduced into the criminal justice system,” NAACP chapter president Rosemary Harris Lytle said, according to a media advisory.

“With this endorsement, NAACP activists in Colorado take a significant step: calling for equity, justice and more effective policy — such as the proposal to regulate marijuana like alcohol in our state,” she added. “The flawed drug policies that so negatively impact our communities must be replaced with policy that is not disproportionately punitive based on race but that helps us get to the root causes of drug use and abuse in America.”

The Raw Story
Drug war’s racial disparity moves NAACP to embrace marijuana legalization
Stephen C. Webster

Prohibition failed and in the process created a well-financed criminal underground. Why did anyone expect anything different from the war on drugs? Or now the war on sex?

Sir Richard Branson — Solve Spain's problems by legalizing and taxing cannabis

Sir Richard Branson believes that the ideal way for Spain to get out of its current morass of national debt, savage austerity cuts, and social turmoil would be to legalize and tax marijuana.

The billionaire founder of the Virgin Group suggested at the opening of the world’s largest cannabis museum in Barcelona on Wednesday that this policy “would help get the country back on its feet.”

Branson is a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a body “which includes five ex-presidents and Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, and which concluded last year that the war on drugs had failed and called for experiments in decriminalisation.”

Other members of the commission includeformer U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

Branson was invited to Barcelona to receive the Cannabis Culture Award 2012 on behalf of the commission and in recognition of its ground-breaking report. In his speech, his praised the nearby town of Rasquera, whose inhabitants voted to rent land to a Barcelona cannibis-growers’ society as part of an “anticrisis plan.”

Read it at Raw Story
Richard Branson says Spain can solve its economic problems by legalizing marijuana
By Muriel Kane

Now that is some out of the box thinking about heterodox economics.

Dylan Ratigan — Racism was rebranded ‘the war on drugs’

Dylan is on a tear these days.

“Our big story on this Martin Luther King holiday is the new math of racism in America,” he said. “The greedy bastards have rebranded racism, calling it ‘the war on drugs.’ They’ve made it both acceptable and profitable. While the concerns of racism from the 1950s and 60s have improved in this country, if you look at the numbers the war on drugs has become a racist war.”

He noted that African Americans are ten times more likely than white Americans to be imprisoned for the same drug charges. He also noted there were more African Americans in prison or on probation today than there were slaves in America before the civil war.

Read it at Raw Story (MSNBC video)

Dylan Ratigan: Racism was rebranded ‘the war on drugs’
by Eric W. Dolan

Dylan goes on to talk about the growingly private prison industry and the rising tendency to use prisoners as cheap labor.

Chilling.