"The War on Drugs" a Bust?

[Rev. Rye]

But I wonder, why?

Stop wondering.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/j...ks-hippie/

Report: Aide says Nixon's war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

"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," Ehrlichman 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."

I bet they won't be talking about this in your next history class.

Hell, as a matter of fact, when drugs like Heroin, Marijuana, and Cocaine were first made illegal, even before Nixon, they were connected to minorities (hell, why do you think Canniabis Sativa is most commonly known by a Spanish name?). The "success" (measured in terms of popular support, not in actual effectiveness, which is more or less nonexistent in all cases of well-publicised drugs) of a drug criminalization process is directly proportional to how well the culture projects its image onto "The Other." It's why society was so quick to admit Prohibition of alcohol was a failure, but took decades for large sections of society to say the same about other drugs.