Nixon Official Admits the ‘War on Drugs’ Was Really a War on Blacks - and It Worked
In her pioneering study The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the “Drug War” is just that: a covert system of racial control and oppression comparable to the Jim Crow laws of the 20th century or the Black Codes of the Reconstruction Era. While there has long been abundant evidence that the drug war was tremendously racist not only in its effects but by its very design, the majority of Americans have failed to accept the incredibly disturbing fact that, as Alexander puts it, “something akin to a racial caste system currently exists in the United States.”
Now, however, the racist designs of the Drug War have been confirmed straight from the horse’s mouth. A new report by Dan Baum in Harper’s contains a shocking 1994 admission from John Ehrlichman, the domestic policy chief under President Richard Nixon, that the War on Drugs that he orchestrated was little more than a means of stigmatizing and oppressing both the left and African-Americans, both of whom Nixon felt threatened by. As Baum writes:
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