[Crusader Rabbit]

Well there's no denying it now. The Drug War that has incarcerated millions and torn our society apart, was conceived as a way to repress minorities and the antiwar youth movement. Not that any of us here didn't know that already. But it's nice to hear it directly from the source.

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. 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.”


I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.

Read the rest at Harpers;
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

[420somewhere]

Thanks,

Saw this earlier, what do you know.

[mowood3479]

Fucking dirtbags... They should lock up any of those old fuckers who are still alive and toss em in with the snappers.

That guy has a lot of nerve going on record saying that shit. I mean I've known it was true for a long time but to have the nerve to admit to that kind of evil... That's something else

[noyd666]

and there not finished yet, pigs.

[Ganoderma]

Originally Posted by Crusader Rabbit

Read the rest at Harpers;
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

Another article from another news source.

https://www.thecannabist.co/2016/03/2...hippies/50631/

[Ganoderma]

Nixon was a criminal, we all know this! Laws that he got passed back when he was Pres should become void. It's almost Nazi like.

[mowood3479]

..

[Crusader Rabbit]

This admission confirms beyond any doubt that the incarceration of people for marijuana use and possession, is an act of political repression. Nixon had a commission study the marijuana issue and they came back with a report saying that cannabis use was not harmful to the individual or society. Instead, Nixon increased persecution of users to help keep his Vietnam War going. There should be a federal lawsuit. Anyone locked up for cannabis should be released. All who were incarcerated should be paid reparations.

[Crusader Rabbit]

Another thing; I've worked a lot with teenagers. Something that has always bothered me, is that whenever the subject of the sixties, youth movement, or hippies comes up, all they can think about is the drugs. As if that was all that it was about! Youth now don't understand the antiwar protests, the movement to treat everybody as equals, the desire to live a life full of meaning close to the earth instead of running the money hungry rat race where you try to get the upper hand over everyone else. No, all the kids think the sixties was about drugs and nothing else. This didn't happen by accident. It's the result of a false alternate reality, intentionally constructed to manipulate our society for the benefit of the warmongers.

[Ganoderma]

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politi...pie/index.html

CNN now has the story on their website, on the front page.