Tuesday, March 22, 2016

I finally found...

I finally found ... the quote from John Ehrlichman that first started me thinking about the abject failure of the war on drugs.  Here it is:
“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.”
This is an admission by an insider to the initiation of the so-called war on drugs that the motivation was political, not out of any concern for the people using drugs or the rest of the population.  It was all about winning elections.

I found it in an article that I almost didn't read, because I know I have major disagreements with the author, Dan Baum.  He's an advocate for legalizing drugs (and ending the war on drugs), as am I.  However, he strongly advocates for making drug production and distribution a state monopoly, a notion I find abhorrent.  We have a state monopoly on alcohol distribution where we live in Utah, and the only things that accomplishes here are increased prices and inconvenience.  But the rest of the article is a good backgrounder for anyone who isn't already aware of the scam that's been pulled on them concerning drugs...

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