Top Nixon adviser: We invented the war on drugs to vilify blacks, hippies
President Richard Nixon and his administration invented the War on Drugs to vilify and unjustly punish African Americans and anti-war hippies, according to a just-published interview with Nixon’s late domestic-policy adviser John Ehrlichman.
The interview with Ehrlichman — published in Harper’s April issue — is so alarmingly dastardly that it’s hard to imagine how Colorado-based journalist Dan Baum (mostly) kept it to himself for all these years.
“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman asked Baum in 1994, five years before Ehrlichman died of complications from diabetes. “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...
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