Pubdate: Thu, 07 Apr 2016
Source: Trentonian, The (NJ)
Column: NJ Weedman's Passing the Joint
Copyright: 2016 The Trentonian
Contact:  http://www.trentonian.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1006
Author: Ed Forchion, NJWeedman.com For The Trentonian

MORE OLD PROOF THAT THE WAR ON DRUGS IS A WAR ON BLACK PEOPLE

"I TOLD YOU SO."

Harper's Magazine dredged up a 22-year-old interview with President 
Nixon's former Chief Advisor John Ehrlichman, who admitted the 
administration created the War on Drugs as a means to intentionally 
target and decimate the black community. This old story has become 
big news again, going viral with The Huffington Post, CNN, Rolling 
Stone and USA Today all covering this "revelation" like it was 
breaking news. WTF.

"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."

I remember libertarian activist Kevin Zeese wrote an article for 
AlterNet in 2002 which said the exact same thing. A few black people 
and I ran around saying "LOOK! LOOK!" and nobody cared - not the 
mainstream marijuana legalization organizations, not the black civil 
right organizations, and not the black clergy.

Recently I presented this racist fact before the all-white NJ Supreme 
Court and of course they chose to ignore it, refusing to rule on it 
all. The NJ Supreme Court is happy to continue allowing black people 
to be chattel for the concrete plantation system - Nixon's plan.

This week a black city resident, Mr. Alan, came into my restaurant, 
NJWeedman's Joint, and respectfully criticized my Column "Like a 
coin, terror is two-sided." That's cool, but then he jabbed me by 
saying only 15% of the city agreed with my marijuana legalization 
stance. I disagreed, saying he's stuck in the black old-fogey 
mentality of church. (Please take a Trentonian poll: Should marijuana 
be legal?)

That wasn't a surprise to me; it has always disappointed me that 
black people and black organizations like the NAACP, the black clergy 
associations, and black churches had nothing to say about Nixon's 
racist war on black people - for decades. It always seemed to me that 
"the man's" cross was jammed so far up their posteriors they couldn't 
see the policies of "the man" were overtly racist against black 
people, especially young black men. Our black leaders have failed us 
tremendously with regard to the War on Drugs. Nixon's racist policies 
are the law of the land and have been for 40 years! Why are they 
scared to say, "Stop enforcing these racist laws"? Where has the NAACP been?

To the pastors: Don't smoke weed, but stop supporting imprisoning our 
youth while the man is getting paid for the same weed!

Many of our black leaders have blindly accepted the government's 
propaganda, distortions, and exaggerations about marijuana and act 
like black people who use "Cannabis" deserve the punishments the 
government heaps upon us-even though the punishments are 
disproportionately enforced. It's one of the major reasons I have 
very little respect for any of them.

I've always felt these black church leaders, on some moral or 
religious superiority complex, ignored and actually condoned Nixon's 
racist drug war, which was *in fact* directed at our communities. 
They generally still believe the government's Reefer Madness lies and 
help perpetuate them through their lack of resistance to this racist 
government policy. The drug war has harmed us more than segregation.

This is exactly why on 11/15 I called the Trenton City Council 
cowards, because to me the City Council was black people once again 
being scared of defying "the man," behaving like "good jigaboos" and 
refusing to even vote on a resolution calling for "ending the racist 
enforcement of marijuana laws on the youth of Trenton." They should 
have been embarrassed that white City Council member Marge 
Caldwell-Wilson was the only one championing the plight of black 
victims of the marijuana laws, while all the black Council members 
said nothing as usual.

BTW: City Council, why doesn't Trenton have a residency clause for 
its police employees?

For most of my adult life I've known that the War on Drugs was a 
racist government program. Anyone who didn't know it didn't want to 
know it. I knew this as a young man in my twenties in Camden County 
as I watched several of my friends ruined by "the man's weed laws." 
In my thirties (1990s), the internet came to be and it was easy to 
read and research this fact; which I did. And I too became a victim 
of the pot laws.

One of the first things I learned while researching why marijuana is 
illegal: the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was created and inspired by 
known racist Harry Anslinger and enhanced by Nixon. I always regarded 
marijuana laws as Jim Crow laws, and if you Google my writings from 
the '90s you'll see I've consistently argued that the marijuana laws 
should be treated like a civil rights issue.

Ironically, this is why mainstream marijuana organizations always 
rejected me. So I became an individual activist. No matter how much 
media I'd generate, no matter how hard I publicly fought for 
"legalization for all" or what tactics I'd employ to bring awareness 
to the marijuana legalization debate, no marijuana organization would 
accept me, work with me, or assist me. Because I was the black 
marijuana activist, who refused to put down the race cards dealt to 
me by Anslinger, Nixon, and our nation's white Congress. I spoke out 
against the drug war's racist aspects that affected black people. My 
white activist counterparts cringed, or rolled their eyes and called 
me "a radical loose cannon, Marijuana X." Again, I can say, "I told 
you so." (There still is a thick glass ceiling in the legalization 
movement, but I don't want in now.)

What Nixon did by creating the war on us-oops, drugs, as a means of 
attacking black people has worked very, very well!

Black people are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana 
possession than white people despite comparable usage rates, 
according to ACLU report "The War on Marijuana in Black and White." 
The report also found that marijuana arrests now make up nearly half 
of all drug arrests, with police making more than 7 million marijuana 
possession arrests between 2001 and 2010. "The war on marijuana has 
disproportionately been a war on people of color," said Ezekiel 
Edwards, director of the ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project.

[Puff, puff] That was Nixon's plan! I think the ACLU should rename 
the report "Nixon's Black Plan."

Several times over the years I've tried to get these organizations to 
help me bring these facts and arguments to the higher courts to no 
avail. Despite them, currently I have a petition before the U.S. Supreme Court.

I've asked the NAACP-NJ several times to enjoin this case and file an 
amicus brief in support of the arguments raised. The NAACP-NJ was as 
uninterested as the NJ Supreme Court.

The very first question I ask the U.S. Supreme Court is: "Are New 
Jersey's drug laws inherently discriminatory against 
African-Americans and discriminatory as applied by law enforcement?"
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom