"The War on Drugs" a Bust?

[Pat Mustard]

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.

You can go as far back as J. Edgar Hoover, who started the whole shebang in an effort to keep his FBI funded. After the mafia were busted and prohibition was ended (thanks very little to the FBI) Hoover was mad to find something to keep his bloated agency going. He hit on the idea of turning cannabis into marijuana, creating a big scare about how it affected people making them habitual criminals and immoral people, and claiming that it was Mexican gangs who controlled the supply of cannabis (Trump could learn a few lessons in hate from Hoover). So the drugs war was started by a kleptomaniac criminal in charge of a branch of US law enforcement.