![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
THAT JOHN ERLICHMAN QUOTE
There’s a quote by John Erlichman making the rounds in which he explains the real reason President Nixon declared the first shot in the American War On Drugs:
The quote is included in Dan Baum’s recent Harper’s article advocating full-on drug legalization. But for all the current social-media dithering about what sounds like a shocking revelation, it’s actually an old quote. Baum got that quote from Erlichman during an interview in 1994. And it’s been public since at least 2012, when Baum recounted the story in an anthology called The Moment: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories from 125 Writers and Artists Famous & Obscure.
The big question, of course, isn’t whether Erlichman really said it, but is what he said true? And did he know (or at least believe) it was true when he said it?
Well, who can say? Given what we’ve learned about Nixon from the Watergate tapes, it’s certainly plausible.
Does it mean the War On Drugs as we know today it is inherently racist? Perhaps unwittingly. I doubt every presidential admin since Nixon who took over the WoD were handed a memo from the outgoing team saying: “Remember: the object of the WoD is to put black people in jail.”
But I don’t think that matters. Whatever the intentions and motivations of the WoD in the 21st Century, the results speak for themselves, says German Lopez at Vox:
Although black Americans aren't more likely to use or sell drugs, they're much more likely to be arrested for them. And when black people are convicted of drug charges, they generally face longer prison sentences for the same crimes, according to a 2012 report from the US Sentencing Commission.
So I do think the Erlichman quote deserves to be circulated more widely than it has been.
Is the quote in itself justification for legalization? Not really, if only because there is plenty of evidence that the WoD is one of the most disastrous and expensive boondoggles in US govt history, and has been for years, regardless of how racially motivated it may have been at the start, and regardless of the racial impact now.
So the argument for legalization is already sound, IMO. But then the question becomes: to what extent do you legalize?
As Lopez at Vox points out, Baum’s call for full-on legalization ignores the possibility that drug prohibition has been effective to a point, mainly by making harder drugs too expensive for most people. Case in point: in the last couple of decades, painkiller addiction has skyrocketed mainly because doctors have been making them more accessible.
Basically you have people arguing for full-on prohibition or full-on legalization, but there are middle-ground options as well. For my money, the biggest problem with the WoD has been the zero-tolerance policy that treats drug use as a criminal issue rather than a public health issue. I’d like to see a policy that reverses that and keeps the prohibition focused on the cartels and suppliers for the truly dangerous drugs.
In any case, the US has been long overdue for a serious conversation about this. Sadly, we are not about serious conversations right now, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
War all the time,
This is dF
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “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.”
The quote is included in Dan Baum’s recent Harper’s article advocating full-on drug legalization. But for all the current social-media dithering about what sounds like a shocking revelation, it’s actually an old quote. Baum got that quote from Erlichman during an interview in 1994. And it’s been public since at least 2012, when Baum recounted the story in an anthology called The Moment: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories from 125 Writers and Artists Famous & Obscure.
The big question, of course, isn’t whether Erlichman really said it, but is what he said true? And did he know (or at least believe) it was true when he said it?
Well, who can say? Given what we’ve learned about Nixon from the Watergate tapes, it’s certainly plausible.
Does it mean the War On Drugs as we know today it is inherently racist? Perhaps unwittingly. I doubt every presidential admin since Nixon who took over the WoD were handed a memo from the outgoing team saying: “Remember: the object of the WoD is to put black people in jail.”
But I don’t think that matters. Whatever the intentions and motivations of the WoD in the 21st Century, the results speak for themselves, says German Lopez at Vox:
Although black Americans aren't more likely to use or sell drugs, they're much more likely to be arrested for them. And when black people are convicted of drug charges, they generally face longer prison sentences for the same crimes, according to a 2012 report from the US Sentencing Commission.
So I do think the Erlichman quote deserves to be circulated more widely than it has been.
Is the quote in itself justification for legalization? Not really, if only because there is plenty of evidence that the WoD is one of the most disastrous and expensive boondoggles in US govt history, and has been for years, regardless of how racially motivated it may have been at the start, and regardless of the racial impact now.
So the argument for legalization is already sound, IMO. But then the question becomes: to what extent do you legalize?
As Lopez at Vox points out, Baum’s call for full-on legalization ignores the possibility that drug prohibition has been effective to a point, mainly by making harder drugs too expensive for most people. Case in point: in the last couple of decades, painkiller addiction has skyrocketed mainly because doctors have been making them more accessible.
Basically you have people arguing for full-on prohibition or full-on legalization, but there are middle-ground options as well. For my money, the biggest problem with the WoD has been the zero-tolerance policy that treats drug use as a criminal issue rather than a public health issue. I’d like to see a policy that reverses that and keeps the prohibition focused on the cartels and suppliers for the truly dangerous drugs.
In any case, the US has been long overdue for a serious conversation about this. Sadly, we are not about serious conversations right now, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
War all the time,
This is dF