War on Drugs Is War on ‘Dangerous Classes’ – Official
A top policy advisor to disgraced US President Nixon admitted that the war on drugs was created to target hippies, anti-war activists and ethic minorities, a fresh article in Harpers magazine has revealed.
Harpers writer Dan Baum unearthed a quote from Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, who was jailed in the 70s after being convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury linked to the Watergate scandal, which conclusively exposed the strategy behind Prohibition.
“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?” Ehrlichman said in an interview in 1994.
“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,” he said,
“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,” he admitted. (Harpers )
His confession matched the assessment exactly of celebrated philosopher and civil liberties guru Noam Chomsky who in 2002, said it was ‘reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control”.
Calling for drug use to be controlled with ‘education, prevention and rehabilitation’, Mr Chomsky also linked the drug war to America’s ever growing inequality and the elite’s harsh ‘neoliberal policies’ of the last few decades.
“If most people are dissatisfied and others are useless, you want to get rid of the useless and frighten the dissatisfied. The drug war does this,” he continued.
“The drug war not only gets rid of the superfluous population, it frightens everybody else. Drugs play a role similar to communism or terrorism, people huddle beneath the umbrella of authority for protection from the menace,” he wrote.
