A Comm for Historymemes

You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? 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.

~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past-is-never-dead/drug-war-confessional

Highly recommended related reading: https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-school-of-the-americas

and remember folks: every drug we've banned has ended up having medical uses that dramatically improve peoples lives but took 60 years to finally demonstrate etc because they were illegal to research.

Aroo!

Thanks for the HMOs, as well.