[carver]

It's even worse than that: politicians created over-reaching laws and enforcement, to demographically target political opponents and take away their right to vote.

> "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." – John Ehrlichman, to Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971.

Meta source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs#20th_century

[njarboe]

This is a very powerful quote. It is too bad that it was first published[1] 12 years after Erlichman told it to Baum and after Erlichman died. It sure fits with what I think Nixon was capable of, but I wonder how embellished the actual quote given by Baum so many years after Ehrlichman said it. Would have been nice to have Ehrlichman confirm it but he was already dead when this quote was published.

[1]https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

[DataWorker]

I don’t think your assertion is supported by the facts. Your own Wikipedia citation even seems to counter your claim.