I think by now, it's pretty common knowledge that the War on Drugs was created by Nixon and his cabinet with poor intentions. And even if they didn't have poor intentions, it failed miserably and ruined the lives of many people.

I think by now, it’s pretty common knowledge that the War on Drugs was created by Nixon and his cabinet with poor intentions. And even if they didn’t have poor intentions, it failed miserably and ruined the lives of many people – especially black people.

I’m not going to go into the actual numbers of just how many innocent black people’s lives were ruined by The War on Drugs. If you’re really curious about the actual statistics and numbers and all that other fancy sh*t, just do the research yourself. There are documentaries everywhere and a lot of resources.

Why I’m here now, is because after doing some digging on the powerful world wide web, I came across something that infuriated me. A quote.

A quote that should give you reason to almost always question your government and authorities. A quote that you may have heard before, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t.

The quote comes from someone in Nixon’s cabinet – John Ehrlichman, who served as Nixon’s domestic policy advisor. It came from an interview in 1994 by Dan Baum who later talked about it in this article published in Harper’s back in 2016.

Ready? Here’s what Ehrlichman said:

“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.”

The worst part about this is that I’m not shocked.

But, that being said I think it’s important for everyone to know this proves The War on Drugs was not created to help people. It was created to stifle, belittle, and imprison minorities (mostly black and latino). Lots of them, innocent too. It also fueled the demand for drugs outside of the U.S., especially in Mexico, which has since fueled incredible amounts of violence.

The thing that really sticks out in this quote is the word “criminalizing.” Why? Because, he wasn’t talking about criminalizing the drugs, he was talking about criminalizing the people. It was merely a tool, to create criminality where there otherwise wouldn’t be.

The War on Drugs can’t be erased from history, but we can erase the policies and re-evaluate them. Other countries have proven time and time again that less strict drug policies have shown positive results. Maybe instead of the War on Drugs, we should start a War on Strict Drug Policies.