Nixon’s Drug War Targeted Black People and The Anti-War Left. Can We End It Now?

At this point if you told me Richard Nixon invented AIDS, I would have to at the very least do some minor Googling to confirm or deny what sounds like just one more example of his being the biggest, wart-coveredest phallus that has ever fucked this great country of ours.

As it turns out, it’s very possible that two of the motivating factors for Tricky Dick’s desire to start the War on Drugs — remember, he founded the Drug Enforcement Agency with an executive order — were very simply put: racism and the suppression of free speech. While absolutely none of that should come as even a minor shock to anyone, it’s pretty insane reading the quote from John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s top domestic policy adviser, that seems to confirm our worst suspicions.

Writer Dan Baum relates the story of an interview with Ehrlichman for a book he was doing on drug laws in the 1990’s. The details of the interview were published in Harper’s. Per the website Vox, there is an insanely damning exchange, as follows.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “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.” (source)

Let’s see if we can guess how the Limbaughs and Hannities will spin this, shall we? Pretty simple, I’d think. “Liberals are talking about it so it’s all lies.” They’ll point out that Ehrlichman served time behind bars for his role in Watergate and had an ax to grind against Nixon. But why would he, I wonder, implicate himself as well if it weren’t true? If anything, it sounds he was going full “scorched earth” at that point, and that’s when people are often times willing to open up about a subject they’d normally be very guarded about.


So stepping over the dog turd sandwich that will be the right’s response to this, let’s just all hold hands and agree that Dick Nixon was the worst human being to occupy the White House, perhaps ever. I need all sane, rational adults to do that, okay? Because the bewigged, pontificating human herpe sore that is currently steamrolling and hard trolling his way to the Republican nomination could be the next Nixon, if Nixon also hit himself with a hammer over the head fifteen times a day. Maybe Trump is a harmless moron that Congress will simply sidestep and obstruct for four years, and that would be dandy, but the fact is the way he spoke after the Brussels attacks sounded like how I imagine Nixon would talk in his mind when he was fapping.

But after we all agree that Nixon is the worst human ever to sit in the Oval Office, can we do something far more important…like…ending the fucking War on Drugs?

What more do we need, America? What exactly is it that we’re waiting for? I’ve seen a study cited that showed the drug war drives up the cost of drugs like cocaine so high that it puts it out of the reach of the super-poor. So you know, it’s totally fine that we’re locking up people of color left and right for a plant, because it’s also keeping those in poverty from picking up a taste for the booger sugar, right, America?

Please, pretty please, with leafy green stuff on top, let’s stop giving Richard M. Nixon power over us from the beyond the grave. If the War on Drugs was started by a liberal president to purge pro-war conservatives, do you think Republicans would stand for its continued existence? If it was supposed to target white people, would state governments in the south lean on it so much for law enforcement funding?

Of course not.

I say we all take a deep breath and remove the Dick that’s been fucking us for more than 40 years. We might just breathe easier, and if nothing else, we’ll stop being shitty people who lock up someone for possessing a plant. Just a thought though; what do I know?