“Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue…that we couldn’t resist it.” – John Ehrlichman, White House counsel to President Nixon on the rationale of the War on Drugs.
“[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks” Haldeman, his Chief of Staff wrote, “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
A friend of mine chimes in:
“Modern Prohibition/War on Drugs is the most destructive, dysfunctional and immoral policy since slavery & Jim Crow – Retired Police Detective Howard Wooldridge – Citizens Opposing Prohibition
Rand Paul chimes in.
As does Eric. And Eric is right. People should be allowed to be racists. But government should be color blind. And ours is not. At least when it comes to enforcing Prohibition. And funny enough – laws born from racism are enforced that way.
All this was prompted by an article at Reason.
Comments
7 responses to “Nixon Started The Race War”
[…] did a post about The Race War In America. And then I came across this post with video about the race war in Baltimore. Here is the video: […]
I don’t think he started it. But he certainly did his best to exacerbate it.
(As did all the Republican and Democrat presidents after him.)
Kathy,
Chalk it up to the hyperbole of a blog post. And you are correct. All the Presidents since have followed in his foot steps.
And we think Wilson a bad President for enabling the KKK. We have had a string of them. For 45 years.
As my friend likes to say:
“Modern Prohibition/War on Drugs is the most destructive, dysfunctional and immoral policy since slavery & Jim Crow – Retired Police Detective Howard Wooldridge
Citizens Opposing Prohibition
>“Modern Prohibition/War on Drugs is the most destructive, dysfunctional and immoral policy since slavery & Jim Crow – Retired Police Detective Howard Wooldridge<
mike brown and his robbing the asian guy before his untimely death says no. blacks have a problem only blacks can fix libtards.
This may have worked in 1968 but the minority population is now 30% of the population and have decided the last two elections for deems and 2004 election for bush when kerry and unions were ambivalent on immigration. If we have a baltimore a month there goes the southern strategy!
newrouter,
All kinds of crime was exacerbated by Alcohol Prohibition. You might want to re-read your history.
But tell you what. Let us end Prohibition and give it 20 years for those who grew up under this regime to mature. That I believe is a fair test of who is right.
And newrouter,
I expect results to start showing up within 3 years after ending Prohibition – if Colorado is anything to go by.