[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.