A decades old quote from President Nixon’s administration is making front page news and being shared widely around the web. The quote from John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief gained new notoriety after appearing in a cover story in Harper’s Magazine by author Dan Baum.
“You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of 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.”
Here is a statement from the Drug Policy Alliance:
“This explosive admission, while provocative, is sadly nothing new. The Drug Policy Alliance and our allies in the movement to end the drug war have long known that U.S. drug policies and have been inherently racist and discriminatory. Despite comparable rates of drug use and sales, communities of color and other marginalized groups have been the principle targets of drug law enforcement and make up the vast majority of people who have been incarcerated or otherwise had their lives torn apart by the drug war. That said, it is enormously important that this quote has captured so much attention and shed light on the blatantly racist origins of this horrible policy approach.
“DPA’s work is centered on speaking truth to power and demanding accountability for the gross harms caused by the drug war. We challenge draconian sentencing laws, arrest tactics, negligence of life-saving health interventions in favor of prohibitionist policies, stigmatization and bigoted targeting of black and Latino communities here in the U.S., as well as minority and vulnerable populations internationally.
“As world leaders gather next month for the United National General Assembly Special Session on drug policy, DPA urges participants to publicly abandon the drug war, initiated by U.S. politicians like Nixon, which has resulted in overwhelming damage here and across the globe. In preparation for this gathering, we invite the public to join us for a one-day strategy session with some of the nation’s top thinkers who will address the drug war as a racial justice issue and offer visions for reform.”
DPA Fact Sheet: The Drug War, Mass Incarceration and Race
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Date Published: March 23, 2016
Published by Drug Policy Alliance