Nixon launched the War on Drugs explicitly to disrupt black communities

Evidence

In 1971 President Richard Nixon launched his infamous War on Drugs, which unleashed the next wave of mass incarceration. Nixon’s close aide John Ehrlichman reportedly admitted the campaign was racially motivated: “We had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people…. 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.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 410

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the ‘hidden history → saturated-system harm → righting wrongs’ architecture — this is a smoking-gun statement of intent by a Nixon aide, parallel to the candid admissions Brown excavates in the Whiteness of Wealth genre.