[refurb]

Pretty sure this quote has been discredited. Some reporter said he said it, but after he died, so it can’t be confirmed. His family says that quote doesn’t sound like him at all. Even if he did say it, it’s one guys opinion and doesn’t reflect gov’t policy.

[jdietrich]

It's an incontrovertible historical fact that the prohibition of opium and and cocaine was substantially racially motivated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Narcotics_Tax_Act

[refurb]

Don’t disagree, but that doesn’t prove racism was Nixon’s reason for the war on drugs.

[pm90]

A simple google search will turn up many credible articles all of which show pretty substantially that Nixon was very much racist, and that many of his policies were... colored... by his racism.

e.g. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-a-historian-uncov..., https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

[save_ferris]

One of Nixon's chief advisers admitted in an interview years later that the war on drugs was explicitly targeted at black people[0]. Criminalizing blacks was a primary objective of this policy.

0: https://qz.com/645990/nixon-advisor-we-created-the-war-on-dr...

[refurb]

This is the same quote as above. Reporter does interview, waits until the guy dies, then says “he said this”, while people who knew him said “I don’t think so”.

[meowface]

It likely was a motive, but it doesn't necessarily make the quote real. I have trouble believing Nixon or his advisors would give a supervillain monologue like that, personally, even if those were their exact intentions.

[tim333]

Well as one of the earlier links said

>Nixon advisor: We created the war on drugs to “criminalize” black people and the anti-war left

so it was more their political enemies in general rather than a race. Not to say it wasn't part racist.

[leetcrew]

read the whole thread man. I don't think anyone here doubts that drug enforcement in America is racially motivated, but you're the third person to cite that very dubious quote.

[int_19h]

The association between drugs and racial minorities has been established long before then - pick any random Anslinger quote about drugs, and it'll have something racial. So it would be perfectly consistent.

[catalogia]

I don't know about that quote being discredited, but I believe I've read a few comments from rayiner here that make a pretty convincing argument that when Nixon coining the term "War on Drugs" in 1971, it was part of an effort against organized crime and was preceded by a decade of rising violent crime. And, if I recall his argument correctly, that it was Reagan who really amped up the 'war'.

My take is that both narratives are simultaneously true. That different people involved had different motivations, some people having multiple motivations. The dimensional of the true series of the events is too high for any human to comprehend, so we instead study lower dimension projections of the truth. Like flatlanders looking at a cylinder; some think it looks like a rectangle and some thinks it looks like a circle. There can be underlying truth to multiple perspectives that may seem mutually contradictory at lower dimensions.

[mehrdadn]

> Pretty sure this quote has been discredited.

By whom? (Citation?) This is the first time I'm hearing that.

[refurb]

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32247/did-ehrli...

[wayoutthere]

So it was a direct quote from an article that was wholly consistent with contemporary sources. The only “controversy” is that the quote can’t be independently verified by StackExchange users because the guy died 20 years ago.

[nerdponx]

The top answer even throws shade on the "it doesn't sound like my father" response.

[lostlogin]

Thanks for this - the link is worth following and the top comment well worth reading.

[refurb]

You’re leaving out the fact people who knew him said “That doesn’t sound like something he’d say at all”.

[staticautomatic]

Yeah and Ted Bundy's parents were adamant that he was a sweet boy who would never hurt a soul.

[refurb]

So given the choice between a reporter claiming he said something and the person’s family and coworkers saying he didn’t, you’d go with the reporter?

[staticautomatic]

Your assertion is that it's been summarily discredited by a speculative though not unreasonably inferential comment on StackExchange?