Quite a Successful Drug War on the People

Some people still believe that our government cares about them and wants to keep them safe. 

​From the Business Insider Alex Lockie  Jul 31, 2019, 2:42 PM
Top Nixon adviser reveals the racist reason he started the 'war on drugs' decades ago

• President Richard Nixon in 1971 declared a US "war on drugs" that hasn't saved the US from the dangers of drugs, but has fueled migrant crises and the mass incarceration of minorities in the US.
• A top Nixon aide told an author that the policy was specifically designed to target opposition to Nixon: Blacks and Hippies. 
• Today, hundreds of thousands of people of color languish in jail for drug charges as the US's seemingly insatiable appetite for drugs wreaks havoc on countries in Latin America, fueling humanitarian crises at the border and far beyond it. 

Dan Baum, the author of 1996's "Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure," wrote in Harper's Magazine in 2016 that while researching his book, Ehrlichman gave a reason for the war of drugs that had little to do with protecting Americans from reefer madness. "You want to know what this was really all about?" Ehrlichman asked, referring to the war on drugs.

"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," he concluded, according to Baum.