[binbashthefash]

It's bizarre that we let Nixon start a ware against a plant as a facade for destroying Jewish and Black activist communities. The government discriminated against them first with something that shouldn't have been illegal to begin with. This is an acknowledgement of that reality.

[binbashthefash]

"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?" Ehrlichman told Baum.

"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."

[jollybean]

Yes, Nixon, that horrible man for criminalizing heroin! So racist! Imagine if we were all free from this oppression to shoot up any time!

My god man.

[gruez]

>It's bizarre that we let Nixon start a ware against a plant as a facade for destroying Jewish and Black activist communities.

The actual situation is much more nuanced than that. The war was also supported by many black leaders and drug makers at the time.

>But early on, many African-American leaders championed those same tough-on-crime policies.

>The Rev. George McMurray was lead pastor at the Mother A.M.E. Zion Church in Harlem in the 1970s, when the city faced a major heroin epidemic. He called for drug dealers to spend the rest of their lives behind bars. [...]

>Black support for the drug war didn't just grow in New York alone. At the federal level, members of the newly formed Congressional Black Caucus met with President Richard Nixon, urging him to ramp up the drug war as quickly as possible. [...]

>Voting records show that many black lawmakers supported some of the most punitive drug-war-era laws in America. But even some people who have long opposed harsh sentencing laws understand where supporters were coming from. The Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a longtime pastor in New York, once was addicted to heroin and served time. He's convinced that black leaders who embraced the drug war did serious harm to the community, but says a lot of African-Americans were desperate for ways to make their neighborhoods safe again. "If you're the victim, then you don't want to hear anything about treatment, just, 'Get this guy off the street.' "

[binbashthefash]

It's actually very straightforward

Ehrlichman told Baum. "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."

[jollybean]

It's even simpler: Heroin is really a terrible thing and should have been criminalized much earlier, and weed is an 'on the fence' substance which was made illegal in most of the Western world, not just the USA (inc. Vietnam, Brazil, Japan, Soviet Union etc.), thereby throwing to the wind your ridiculous conspiracy theories, and suggesting it was a broad civilizational issue that we are adjusting over time.

[exq]

I don't know anything about Vietnam or Brazil, but the Japanese had cultivated hemp for thousands of years and it only became illegal in 1948 during the US occupation.

[exq]

If weed is an "on the fence" substance, alcohol should be illegal.