Pubdate: Thu, 24 Mar 2016
Source: Independent  (UK)
Copyright: 2016 Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.independent.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/209
Author: Tim Walker, US Correspondent

DRUGS WAR WAS PLOY TO TARGET BLACK PEOPLE, SAYS NIXON AIDE

America's so-called "war on drugs" began as little more than a ploy 
to enable Richard Nixon to go after his political enemies, one of the 
disgraced President' s former policy gurus admitted in an interview 
which has surfaced for the first time.

John Ehrlichman, who had advised Nixon on domestic policy, told the 
journalist Dan Baum that the drugs war was an excuse to target "the 
antiwar left and black people", Mr Baum writes, in a new report 
advocating drug legalisation for Harper's Magazine.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, 
had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people," Mr Ehrlichman 
said in the 1994 interview.

"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 criminalising both 
heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

"We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes ... and vilify them 
night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying 
about the drugs? Of course we did."

In 1970, Nixon signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and 
Control Act; three years later he set up the US Drug Enforcement 
Administration, naming drug abuse "Public Enemy No 1".

His former aide's claims about his motives may be overblown, though. 
Mr Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, spent 18 months in jail for his part 
in the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down, and he reportedly 
remained bitter that his old boss never pardoned him.

The drug war has been waged by seven subsequent administrations and 
is widely considered a failure. It has, however, succeeded in 
victimising black people. Minor drug offences remain the major 
contributor to the overcrowding of US prisons, and their enforcement 
targets mostly young black men.

The Rev Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader, told the New York Daily 
News that Mr Ehrlichman's remarks were "a frightening confirmation of 
what many of us have been saying for years. That this was a real 
attempt... to demonise and criminalise a race of people."
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