Dear Pot Lawyer,
Where did the drug war madness come from?
It seems appropriate to use our second-to-last Ask a Pot Lawyer column to look at how America’s wasteful and harmful drug war came about, and the lessons its origin can tell us about the current generation of drug warriors currently (and hopefully temporarily) occupying the highest levels of our federal government. Our disastrous drug war started in earnest with President Nixon. To get a sense of the moral justification for the drug war, I’d like you to consider a quote from Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, as reported by Harper’s magazine. It is long, but worth reading in its entirety.
“You want to know what [the drug war] 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.”
This is, of course, outrageous.