Nixon's «war on drugs» created to discredit the black community

In this month's issue of Harper's Magazine, the cover story is about the failure of the drug prohibition in the United States. Its author, Dan Baum, opens his article «.« Legalize it all: how to win the war of drugs »In a 1994 interview with John Ehrlichman, President Nixon's former chief advisor, he asked: «How did the United States sink into a policy of drug prohibition that produced so much misery and so few good results?.

John Ehrlichman's response is astonishing: «The Nixon campaign in 1968, and Nixon's subsequent tenure in the White House, had two enemies: the pacifist left and blacks. Do you understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be anti-war or to be black, but by making the public associate hippies with cannabis and blacks with heroin, and criminalizing both very heavily, we could tear these communities apart. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, interrupt their meetings, and slander them day after day on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.»

John Ehrlichman died in 1999, so it's hard to verify the veracity of these words, but... statistics clearly show disproportionate drug arrests and mass incarceration in the black community.

Reactions were swift to follow, including the Drug Policy Alliance All of which tells us that institutional racism is imbued in the war on drugs, and that its damaging influences went far beyond Nixon's legacy».

The article's author Dan Baum concludes his article after recalling that the war on drugs initiated by Nixon has cost billions of dollars and destroyed millions of lives with drastic punishments: «Now, for the first time, we have an opportunity to change things... by legalizing drugs».

In April, the United Nations meet in New York for a General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) to discuss global drug policy. Number of associations, of which French, will be meeting on the sidelines of this summit to try to influence the text that emerges from this session towards a path that would guarantee an end to the global war on drugs.