In just a few days, drugstores like Walgreens will have it in stock, for everyone. Here’s how to use it, and who it will help.

  • FilthyHands
    link
    fedilink
    English
    231 year ago

    “You want to know what this [war on drugs] 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.”

    ~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      Right on. And the same tactic had been going on even earlier. Starting back in the late 1800s with the opium laws in San Francisco. Too many Asians moving in, hence the beginning of the gross “yellow peril” propaganda. The laws were specifically created to target Asians. Then in the 1930s, Reefer Madness-type propaganda was heavily targeted against Mexicans. Blacks and heroin, then crack. Jazz musicians, beatniks, hippies, on and on… always another group to “Other” because of their race or their eschewing of social mores, so pave a legal framework to come down on them from. Much of drug law history was born out of a desire to eliminate an undesireable group.