How The War On Drugs Started
Interesting info on the beginning of the War on Drugs over at The Daily Sheeple. According to them it was a sort of conspiracy by the White House. It reads as believable to me. I was unaware marijuana was made illegal at the federal level in 1970.. I was under the impression it happened long before that:
"Nixon aid John Ehrlichman told journalist Dan Baum in 1994, according to an article published in Harper’s Magazine in 2016, the truth about the origins of the War on Drugs:
You want to know what this was really all about? 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."
posted by Fred Mangels @ 8:01 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
It was, effectively, federally illegal under the 1934 (35?) Marijuana Tax Act. You needed a tax stamp to grow it. That was the result of "Reefer Madness" thanks to William Randolph Hearst and Dow Corning.
This is a good step to show the War On Drugs (trademark?) has been in effect a Viet Nam War era creation of the vast right wing conspiracy....maybe I should shorten that to rwnj..anyway...
The previous original prohibition was also racially based but was amplified and embellished and commoditized by the War On Drugs created by the Nixon and Reaganites, and allowed to continue by successive Democrat and Republican administrations, so well was it instilled in the culture.
The right wingers could done a wiser thing and decriminalized it and we probably would not have the gang drug networks and smuggling we have today, also would have had the contributions to society that would have been made by those whose lives were ruined by Prohibition, we may have also not had the potency of the current strains of weed, ironically perhaps..or not.
What a sad loss....
Interesting this was posted on a desperate rwnj site selling the view that everything is horrible and the only solution is to create teabagger chaos..something the same rich fucks that gave us Prohibition would greatly want so they could scoop up huge profits, again.
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