The War on Drugs was deliberately engineered to harm 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

• SEED: The Ehrlichman quotation is the single most citable piece of evidence in this chapter for the claim that mass incarceration was racially intentional — anchor for any reparations argument and a standing rebuttal to ‘tough on crime’ being race-neutral.
• XREF: connects to: Drug-war arrests and imprisonment fell disproportionately on Black Americans — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 1435