> “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? 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.”
John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon.
Nixon is definitely to blame for starting the whole thing, but practically every administration since than has contributed - and not just Republicans.
For example, you know that progressive darling, Joe Biden? Well, that guy has been instrumental in expanding civil asset forfeiture in collaboration with the Reagan administration, which put in place the economic underpinning of the whole "war on drugs" thing that makes the law enforcement agencies so heavily invested in continued prosecution of it. He was also behind the "COPS" program, which evolved into the present system of police departments militarizing by acquiring surplus and retired equipment from the military, all funded by the feds.
