There Is No Dispute

Commenter hmi has left a link which disputes a quote I have been using a lot.

I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “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.”

“[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.”

Well where did that “wrote” come from? The New York Times has a clue.

Pat Buchanan is the source for “Nixon didn’t say that sort of thing” (paraphrase). The fact that Pat didn’t hear it doesn’t mean it wasn’t said. And the article does admit to the effect even as it disputes the cause.

The War on Drugs has undoubtably caused a large racial divide in the U.S., with black Americans being disproportionately incarcerated.

I do like what Eric quoted on the subject.

“Bad law needs to be dealt with, we don’t need to follow it blindly,” says 86-year-old Ann Lee, the founder and executive director of Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition (RAMP). In an interview with Reason at a Cleveland hotel near the Republican National Convention (RNC), Lee adds, “The mystery to me is why Republicans respect this law like it came from Moses, and when you read how it came about in 1937 under FDR…why Republicans support that is beyond me.”

So in the larger scheme of things can we derive some meaning out of this?

End Prohibition You Fools

I’m talking to YOU my Republican friends.


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3 responses to “There Is No Dispute”

  1. Man Mountain Molehill Avatar
    Man Mountain Molehill

    Cultural, political, economic, protestant moral panic or what?

    Before 1937 did most people even know what marijuana was? If they thought about it at all, it was associated with Mexicans and jazz musicians. Cocaine had been popular with the Great Gatsby generation in the 20s, Cole Porter wrote song lyrics about it. Young Sigmund Freud wrote paeans to coke. Pot, not so much. Gene Krupa getting arrested in 1943 probably helped popularize it.

  2. Man Mountain Molehill Avatar
    Man Mountain Molehill

    Make it less fun for the drug warriors. No more civil asset forfeiture. Take away their high tech weaponry. Enforce the 4th amendment.

  3. Man Mountain Molehill Avatar
    Man Mountain Molehill

    Who are drug warriors? Senile old farts like Bill Bennet, and at the sharp end;
    Ex special forces, macho jocks who love running around with automatic weapons and jumping out of helicopters[1]. Recruit them back into special forces, and turn them loose on something that really deserves it, like moslem jihadis.

    [1] not that there’s anything wrong with that.