https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1209170578692870145
- BernieSanders
The War on Drugs has been a disaster. We need to legalize marijuana nationwide, invest in the communities that have been destroyed by its criminalization, and expunge past marijuana-related convictions.
Bernie is right on this one. The so-called War on Drugs has always been an unmitigated disaster. At least, if you think the goal is to reduce drug use. It's taken decades, but people are finally waking up this fact.
Of course, that's not what it was about.
"You want to know what this was really all about," Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said in the interview after Baum asked him about Nixon's harsh anti-drug policies.
"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 continued.
"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."
But that's all in the past.
The people running the show and wanting to run the show have seen the light and realize that the whole premise is unjust. And that's a good thing. Now if only they would recognize the exact same logic applies to all their other interventions.