Ah, Richard Nixon: The Gift that just Keeps Giving

[thewayne]

"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."
—Nixon aide John Ehrlichman on the War on Drugs

Comments

[silveradept]

Richard Nixon, despite being an awful, horrible person, was a damn good politician, and this could convince people of what he wanted then to believe.