War on Drugs: 50 Years, Billions, and the Ghost of Nixon
Al Jazeera explores the U.S.'s 50-year 'War on Drugs,' cataloging its exorbitant costs, overflowing prisons, and failure to curb violence. While the piece correctly highlights the policy's abysmal track record, it glosses over the crucial historical context: that this 'war' was openly declared a strategic tool against political dissent and minority communities. John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic
policy chief, famously admitted in 1994, "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." So, when we ask what the 'War on Drugs' achieved, perhaps the better question is: what was it designed to achieve for
those in power? The answer, evidently, was the deliberate dismantling of movements and the systematic incarceration of marginalized groups. Trump's threats only promise to reheat an already rotten recipe. Why are we still pretending this was ever about public health?