=By= Matt Agorist
John Daniel Ehrlichman
Finally, there is official, irrefutable proof that the racism and classism so apparent in the "War on Drugs" is not accidental, or a by-blow of legislation. It was indeed implemented as a control mechanism. Further, the loading of the "Justice" system with people of color and economically disadvantaged, and been used as self serving justification to "crack down" on crime; legitimated mandatory sentences and three strikes laws. All of these "tough on crime" policies which virtually no politicians have had the guts or integrity to challenge, are purely control mechanisms of the disadvantaged.
The "War on Drugs" has been an ongoing support of US military presence, and eco-political whip in US relations with South American nations, but also with other regions such as Afghanistan and the Asian "Golden Triangle."
This "war" has reinforced and been used to legitimate all kinds of racism and classism, and butressed prejudice within the society. It is hard to overstate how damaging this policy has been across the spectrum of structured inequality, and legitimating seeing certain portions of our citizenry as permanently "suspect" and "less than" and "less deserving" than "good, white, economically advantaged" citizens. It even carries over to relations with other nations and the atrocities carried out in that other war - the "War of Terrorism" with its encouraged Islamophobobia and increasing xenophobia.
The ramifications of this ill conceived pogrom reverberate through domestic and international relationships and only deepened structural inequality, and growing animosity, within the United States.
[dropcap]J[/dropcap]ohn Daniel Ehrlichman was counsel and domestic policy chief to President Richard Nixon. He was a key figure in events leading to the Watergate first break-in and the ensuing Watergate scandal, for which he was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and served a year and a half in prison.
Aside from the conspiracy of Watergate, which when compared to today’s politicians seems like schoolyard pranks, Ehrlichman, while serving under Nixon, was part of a much larger, and far more detrimental conspiracy that is still playing out today — the war on drugs.
In a new report, in Harper’s Magazine, written by Dan Baum, Ehrlichman comes clean on the real reason behind the war on drugs — to criminalize blacks and hippies.
According to Baum, he tracked down Ehrlichman in 1994 at his engineering firm in Atlanta, Georgia.
“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman bluntly asked Baum of the war on drugs. “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.”
According to Baum, that was the end of the conversation, “he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door,” recalls Baum.
What has ruined millions of lives and ended countless others, has been nothing more than a political play to remove the party’s opposition.
We’ve seen police departments turn from Andy Griffith to storm troopers armed with MRAPs tearing down entire houses, throwing grenades into the cribs of babies, and stripping the rights away from hundreds of millions of people — for what?
Epileptic children across the country continue to suffer and die because cops will lock their parents a cage for attempting to treat them with cannabis and they do so only because they believe in some fraud idea concocted decades ago by corrupt fat cats in D.C. looking to silence their opposition.
Thanks to the black market trade of drugs, pushed into dark alleys, by a system of oppression and prohibition, drug peddling violent gangs now plague places like Chicago, New York, and Detroit.
Democrats blame guns for the violence while Republicans blame gun control. Meanwhile, both sides are missing the giant pink elephant in the living room.
At the center of this tragic violence plaguing American streets is a giant Leviathan which lays waste to all lives it comes across, it’s called the American Drug War.
America has the largest prison population in the world. It is estimated that victimless crime constitutes 86% of the federal prison population. That means the only reason that these individuals are incarcerated is because the state deemed their non-violent personal choices, “illegal.” The majority of that 86% is for illegal drugs only.
Most of the people who are thrown in prison are non-violent. However, when they are locked in cages with society’s worst and treated like cattle in a factory farm, they come out forever changed. America is breeding a torturous and violent environment, and they have the audacity to call this the “justice system.”
As former Congressman Ron Paul pointed out prior to the revelation admitted by Ehrlichman;
[Black people] are tried and imprisoned disproportionately. They suffer the consequence of the death penalty disproportionately. Rich white people don’t get the death penalty very often. And most of these are victimless crimes. Sometimes people can use drugs and get arrested three times and never committed a violent act and they can go to prison for life. I think there’s discrimination in the system, but you have to address the drug war. I would say the judicial system is probably one of the worst places where prejudice and discrimination still exists in this country.
The war on drugs has done more to destroy black communities than any amount of bigotry and racism ever could. And, on the other side, the antiwar, consciousness-expanding hippies were marginalized, ended their experimentation with psychedelics, and got in line with the status quo. Instead of turning on, “tuning in and dropping out,” the hippy movement enrolled, voted, and became the politically correct class.
A potentially paradigm-shifting movement of love and peace was effectively neutered by the political and warmongering aspirations of a few corrupt politicians.
Thanks to the unquestioning order followers, carrying out the immoral orders of their oligarchs on high, generations of lies have been perpetuated and millions throughout the world have suffered.
The War on Drugs takes good people and turns them into criminals every single minute of every single day. The system is setup in such a way that it fans the flames of violent crime by essentially building a factory that turns out violent criminals.
The system knows this too!
When drugs are legalized, gang violence drops — drastically. Not only does it have a huge effect on the localized gangs in America, but the legalization of drugs is crippling to the violent foreign drug cartels too.
Until Americans educate themselves on the cause of this violence, uninformed and corrupt lawmakers will continue to focus on controlling the symptoms.
We will see more senseless killings and more innocent lives stripped of opportunity by getting entangled in the system.
The solution is staring us in the face. End the war on drugs.
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs and opened up clean injection facilities for addicts to utilize. These facilities offer clean needles, which has stopped the spread of disease. Users are also monitored by medical staff, which has stopped drug overdoses. Portugal has cut their country’s needle drug use in half since they changed their drug policies. They went from having the worst heroin problem in Europe, to having one of the lowest.
No one is claiming that it will be easy, but the science is there to support this move. Now all we need is for the masses to understand that prohibition is immoral and causes far more problems than it ostensibly prevents. Please share this article with your friends and family so that they may know the history of this unethical and vile — war on people.
Source: The Free Thought Project.
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