"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
"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," Ehrlichman said. "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." [1]
Crack cocaine carried a much harsher sentence then Cocaine, a law that very clearly targeted black people. [2]
Marijuana use is the same between white and black people, but black people are 3.73x more likely to be arrested for it.[3]
[1] Plenty of countries with homogenous populations have harsh drug laws, so it hardly seems like that was the only consideration, if at all. After all, Prohibition in the US happened a long time before 1968, and alcohol is arguably less destructive than heroin, and nobody was targeting hippies or black people with a ban on alcohol.
[3] Black people getting arrested at a higher rate doesn't make the policies racist. It either makes the cops racist (possible) or it means that there are other factors beyond skin color that are affecting the stats (most likely explanation).
