Nixon Aide Admitted the 'War on Drugs' Was Designed to Screw Over Blacks and Hippies

Would it surprise you to learn that the War on Drugs had it's origins in neutralising the enemies of the Nixon administration?



www.vice.com...

According to Watergate mastermind and former Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the then-president launched the notorious (and ongoing) war on drugs in 1971 to disrupt that administration's two greatest perceived threats: black people and antiwar leftists.

And this.

"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?" Ehrlichman told Baum. "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."

If the War on Drugs was promoted as a way of stopping the so-called drug menace, but was really a way to demonise enemies of the government, do you think it is any different today? Is the War on Drugs today concerned with helping people, or continuing to demonise them? If a member of a government administration from over 40 years ago is prepared to come out on the record today, will we see members of other administrations come out in the future regarding the ongoing War on drugs, as well as the War on Terror? Would it surprise one to learn that perhaps the War on Terror is another way to demonise enemies of the government, both internal, and external?

One does wonder...

An article with a lot more pertinent information can be found here;

harpers.org...

I can see the general public being unaware of the correlation, but from all the information, resources, and evidence we get here on ATS, I wonder if anyone here doesn't believe the information in the OP is factual?

The War on Drugs is absolutely ridiculous. We can tell it's ridiculous because of the successes other countries have had with legalizing drugs, even hard drugs like heroin, and the reduction in crime, death by those drugs, so on and so forth through their programs.

Primarily the War on Drugs must be a financial gain for 'somebody', considering the US pours billions into it annually with something like a 1% success rate. It just doesn't make any sense at all if it isn't for money, racism, or anything other than what it should be for, helping people.

The original source of the story says that it's something the reporter recalled Ehrlichman saying in a 1994 interview. So why is this a story now, and why did it take this reporter 22 years to 'recall' this statement?

originally posted by: AdmireTheDistance
The original source of the story says that it's something the reporter recalled Ehrlichman saying in a 1994 interview. So why is this a story now, and why did it take this reporter 22 years to 'recall' this statement?

www.huffingtonpost.com.au...

Baum explained to The Huffington Post why he didn’t include the quote in his 1996 book, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure.

“There are no authorial interviews in [Smoke and Mirrors] at all; it’s written to put the reader in the room as events transpire,” Baum said in an email. “Therefore, the quote didn’t fit. It did change all the reporting I did for the book, though, and changed the way I worked thereafter.”

The quote does, however, appear in the 2012 book The Moment, a collection of “life-changing stories” from writers and artists.

Damn. It sounds like the round table from The Godfather. "Don't sell it near schools. Sell in the ghettos. Let them lose their souls."

a reply to: cuckooold

Well considering Nixon was the one that got us OUT of Johnson's war in Vietnam; you would be hard pressed to prove that Nixon had it in for the anti-war crowd. I also find it amusing how little Nixon did to earn his impeachment. By today's standards the guy was a saint.

a reply to: Metallicus

Remember that sticky thai stick vets would get the habit from?
Those who happened to be music enthusiasts or black are old jailbirds now.

a reply to: cuckooold

Would it surprise you to learn that the War on Drugs had it's origins in neutralising the enemies of the Nixon administration?

SHEOL NO . I was there . The administrations' way of revenge on the peaceful sit-ins and protest of the Vietnam War and pollution. They couldnt put us down with police violence (see Kent St.) so they made it a war on drugs.You think the Mid-East war was an unjust war ? Check out the Vietnam war and Tonkin Gulf.
Planted evidence , took us in under "suspicion", you name it.

originally posted by: Metallicus
a reply to: cuckooold

Well considering Nixon was the one that got us OUT of Johnson's war in Vietnam...

Really? You might want to Google the Fall of Saigon.

originally posted by: Metallicus
a reply to: cuckooold

Well considering Nixon was the one that got us OUT of Johnson's war in Vietnam; you would be hard pressed to prove that Nixon had it in for the anti-war crowd. I also find it amusing how little Nixon did to earn his impeachment. By today's standards the guy was a saint.

Nixon got the U.S out of Vietnam after extending the war for his own political gain.

www.bbc.com...

By the time of the election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks - or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had "blood on his hands".

Read the article if you want a reasonably in-depth look at Nixon's deception. The covert bombing of Cambodia hardly counts as a gracious peace initiative either.

a reply to: cuckooold

Nixon got the U.S out of Vietnam after extending the war for his own political gain.

That and he was the commander in chief, not the guy who tells the commander in chief what to do.

a reply to: Metallicus

Well considering Nixon was the one that got us OUT of Johnson's war in Vietnam; you would be hard pressed to prove that Nixon had it in for the anti-war crowd

He was forced to. For a political backlash the size of which was never matched was gathering force.He new it. He knew the climate and how the population viewed the war. The entire administration realized , hey , these people vote. They arent the uninformed , unwashed communist masses we believed them to be.
We forced him to....politically

Remember , Nixon actually STEPPED UP the war and carpet bombing.

a reply to: Gothmog

Yea the communist thing.

The guys who actually kicked hitler's butt while Richard was in the Pacific, were the "terrorists". Interesting

Nixon climbed his way in public service by saying the other guy was a red.
I mean at the time Buffalo Road Woman was just a legend and no threat to any more Custers but "the reds?".

a reply to: wisvol

Thai Stick was cannabis, you don't develop a habit from cannabis use. That's not to say that there wasn't another product derived from papiver somniferum being brought stateside in massive quantities that was of high levels of purity and highly addictive. But it wasn't Thai Stick that led to habitual use, massive highs and horrific withdrawal symptoms.

a reply to: peter vlar

You're thinking of "addiction"

And the trade deals too

"you give us stuff, we give you paper bills"

Just like Star Wars' trade federation & Dooku run the show in clone wars

Trade treaty: the USA owes China a pretty penny

The largest foreign holder of U.S. debt is China, which owns more about $1.2 trillion in bills, notes and bonds, according to the Treasury.

According to usgovinfo.about.com...

So then by way of consequence, just as European citizens may freely travel African nations legally while the opposite isn't true because of Africa's "debt" to Europe (basically they actually pay tribute each year despite having been recently colonized), China expects to be able to send vacationers to the USA.

Which is prohibited currently in the form of quotas.
According to www.state.gov...

Because, owning millions OF millions of dollars, China could send millions of people with buckets of dollars each, who would basically require food and shelter and cars and oil and comfort in exchange for US dollars, which they don't have to earn because they already have earned them.
China being a communist country, they're willing to do that type of thing as a state sponsored program.

And boom! panic in the attic: no more Korn™

Ok maybe I did go off track a little bit but the moderator seems cool and the title says "govt screws blacks"
so seems fair to mention reds and yellows being screwed by the same corporation right?

And the whites too, just like that Bundy bunch in AZ & OR that one time, yet they were Mormons so maybe that counts as grey right

Well, that makes sense, since the civil rights people and the hippies were the groups most responsible for the anti-Vietnam protests.

They weren't just Richard Nixon's enemies. Nixon had a war to win and these people were undeniably communist sympathizers at a time when communism was the de facto enemy of their country and our way of life. What did they expect. Drugs were the common denominator with most of the people who were causing problems.

Not shocked and too bad the aide didn't out sooner about it, not that it would matter due to the propaganda at hand.


It's really a war on everyone:

Hancock makes the point that we enjoy numerous freedoms denied our ancestors, making it “exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty-first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.”

From;

Of course these days continuous Drug War propaganda has the booboisie scared to death of psychedelics. For instance, this Graham Hancock Ted Talk was banned. Suprynowicz offers a number of long quotes from Terence McKenna and others on the freedom of conscious, including this from Thomas Szasz’s The Second Sin, If you talk to god, “that’s prayer. If God talks to you, that’s schizophrenia.”

Source


Also see;

“The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review.” ― Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

Source