{"id":21389,"date":"2016-03-24T06:55:07","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T11:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=21389"},"modified":"2016-03-24T14:48:53","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T19:48:53","slug":"harpers-john-ehrlichman-admitting-the-racist-origin-of-nixons-war-on-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=21389","title":{"rendered":"Harper&#8217;s: John Ehrlichman admitting the racist origin of Nixon&#8217;s &#8220;war on drugs&#8221; in 1993"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Harper&#8217;s: John Ehrlichman admitting the racist origin of Nixon&#8217;s &#8220;war on drugs&#8221; in 1993<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/archive\/2016\/04\/legalize-it-all\/\">Legalize It All | How to win the war on drugs<\/a> by Dan Baum:<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. \u201cYou want to know what this was really all about?\u201d he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. \u201cThe Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I\u2019m saying? We knew we couldn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>CNN: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2016\/03\/23\/politics\/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie\/index.html\">Report: Aide says Nixon&#8217;s war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies<\/a> by Tom LoBianco<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Harper&#8217;s: John Ehrlichman admitting the racist origin of Nixon&#8217;s &#8220;war on drugs&#8221; in 1993 Legalize It All | How to win the war on drugs by Dan Baum:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21389"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21395,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21389\/revisions\/21395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}