War on Drugs: An Inconvenient Truth, 50 Years Late
The Hill's opinion argues the 'War on Drugs' was 'always a war on people.' A revelation to precisely no one who lived through it. Richard Nixon's domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, famously admitted in a 1994 interview with Harper's: 'The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, 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.' So, when The Hill's op-ed today claims the war 'doesn't work,' it begs the question: Doesn't work for whom? For the disproportionately incarcerated Black and brown communities, clearly. For the private
prison industry and expanding police budgets, it worked like a charm. The 'war on people' was the feature, not a bug, making its 'failure' a rather pointed oversight in their belated criticism.