War on drugs aimed at blacks
The cover story in this month’s edition of Harper’s Magazine reveals a damning bit of American history.
That aside from that scallywag Richard Nixon having made attempts to circumvent the whole U.S. Constitution, he left an even darker legacy.
The article’s writer, Dan Baum, highlighted a 1994 interview he conducted with John Ehrlichman, the ex-con, Watergate co-conspirator, who’d served as Nixon’s chief domestic advisor.
Ehrlichman told Baum about Nixon’s so-called “War on Drugs.”
It may have been a bloodless war, yet it concealed the stench of racism.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” Ehrlichman told Baum.
That’s quite a statement. But there’s more. Much, much more.
“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.
Ehrlichman wasn’t finished.
“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night-after-night on the evening news,” he added
I don’t plan to spend this entire column quoting a man who was obviously in agreement with such vicious plans.
Just typing his words gives me the shakes.
I do feel compelled to reveal Ehrlichman’s proud complicity in Nixon’s plans.
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” he said.
With that I find myself being at variance with that part of President Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when he said, “There is not a Black America, and a White America.”
Drug policies, at least as far back as Richard Nixon, don’t seem to support that claim. John Ehrlichman destroyed it.
Many people view this country’s ever-worsening drug problems as only existing in “Black America,” which isn’t really the same place as “The United States of America.”
I might vehemently disagree with those people, but I certainly understand how they’ve come to feel that way.
Some of America’s leaders have embedded into the American psyche the false notion that the country is being overrun by black, wild-eyed drug dealers and their clients.
As a result, many people who aren’t exposed to the nation’s drug culture, just might be quick to point out that drugs and drug abuse exist, but primarily in “Black America,” and that “those” people have to find ways to eradicate them.
Since Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs; through Nancy Reagan’s calls to “Just Say No,” and even in Bill Clinton’s 1994 “criminal justice reform” law, in which Hillary advanced the notion of young black street thugs who were, as she called them, “super-predators,” the lasting effects of the nation’s drug policies have been devastating.
Nixon was largely responsible for the first shots of that “war,” but each president since has had a hand in it.
So much so, that the United States has the largest prison population on earth.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, at the end of 2014, 6,851,000 adults had been supervised in correctional facilities.
Moreover, the Bureau of Justice Statistics did an extensive study and determined that black males get much harsher sentences than their white counterparts for the same offenses.
During the run-up to the New Hampshire primary election in February, a national spotlight was placed on the heroin addiction rate in that state.
Since New Hampshire only has a one percent black population, and a two percent Hispanic population, it’s obvious that the face of the state’s heroin epidemic is white.
There were no serious discussions about there being a burgeoning prison population in New Hampshire – just of the 326 people who died in 2014 of heroin or other opiate overdoses.
The scourge of drug abuse in New Hampshire is being fought in “treatment programs,” as if it’s pneumonia.
It’s clear, though, that serious drug problems have completely seeped from “Black America,” to “The United States of America.”
In fact, they’ve always been everywhere.
It’s time to take note of that.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net
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