For those moments you wonder if black people accidentally ended up in jail because of drugs I quote you one of the architects of the war on drugs:
“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, former
presidential counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs
under President Richard Nixon and Watergate co-conspirator.
Source: Harpers Article
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