Dan Baum has some splaining to do. In 1994, he got former Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman to confess that the war on drugs was launched to punish blacks and the mostly young anti-war movement.

Domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman and President Richard Nixon. Photo via Associated Press and Facebook
Domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman and President Richard Nixon. Photo via Associated Press and Facebook
But it wasn’t until Thursday that his story gained wide traction via an article in Harper’s Magazine titled “Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs.”

Baum writes in the April 2016 issue:

“I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. ‘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.'”

Of course, this has been suspected for decades. But it was a revelation for some:

War on drugs was about disrupting black people and hippies so Nixon could get elected. So, who’s surprised?

Posted by Dennis Corbran on Thursday, March 24, 2016

The decades-long “War on Drugs” was a tool for the federal government to crack down on leftist protesters and “black…

Posted by Bill Moyers on Tuesday, March 22, 2016

We knew it all along, but it doesn’t make it any less infuriating to hear.

Posted by CommonDreams.org on Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Nixon started the War on Drugs because he couldn’t declare war on black people and hippies.

Posted by Boing Boing on Tuesday, March 22, 2016

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