From our friends at the Vera Institute, we learned that John Ehrlichman, a top assistant to President Richard Nixon, had the following comment about the “War on Drugs.”
“We knew we 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 people, 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
Nixon was known to say privately that he knew marijuana was not that bad.
John Ehrlichman was convicted on January 1, 1975 of four felony counts in connection with crimes committed during the Watergate break-in and cover-up, including conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury. On February 21, he was given a prison sentence of 2-1/2 to 8 years. Many other high level government officials went to jail for crimes committed during the Watergate scandal including the Attorney General of the United States, John Mitchell, who served a two year sentence. How times have changed. These days in the United States you get pardoned even if you mounted a revolution against your own country, killed police officers and other innocent people and were bummed out when you couldn’t hang Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. A couple of guys even remembered to bring the nooses with them.