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by throwaway_tech 2375 days ago
>You're wrong, all drug offenders are political prisoners.

Without any support for that statement, it comes of as...pretty authoritarian. As in you are right and everyone else is wrong.

It also doesn't explain why the country with the most prisons is by definition authoritarian...especially when its supported with an unrelated statement about drug offenders, which is applicable to every other country in the World. It seems you just want to call nations of laws, authoritarian governments, because you know...they have laws.
1 comments
SturgeonsLaw 2375 days ago
“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, domestic advisor to President Nixon

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

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throwaway_tech 2372 days ago
>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.

You do know that drug crimes existed pre-Nixon right? Were drug offenders before Nixon not political prisoners too and only after Nixon were drug offenders political prisoners? Since Nixon's administration admitted to using drug laws to break up specific groups from organizing...does that mean only blacks and hippies were political prisoners of the drug laws and all non-blacks and non-hippies just regular criminals or were the political prisoners too even though the Administration had no issue with their politics?

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