[pmiller2]

Except you have it backwards. The "War on Drugs" came about as a way for the state to exert power over youth and minorities.

> “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

> “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,” Ehrlichman said. “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.”

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

From that perspective, the drug war makes perfect sense, and was a spectacular success, not in terms of submission, but in terms of control.

[anaerobicover]

The original publication was at Harper's Magazine, not CNN, but this infamous quotation has dubious provenance and veracity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#Drug_war_quote

[monocasa]

I'm not sure I'd accept the family's statement at face value. In fact that's the statement I'd expect out of them completely orthogonally to it's veracity.

Additionally I don't find the subsequent argument compelling. 'Sure Nixon hated hippies and blacks, but it wasn't an effective policy until workshopped by subsequent presidents, so targetting those groups couldn't have been the point" doesn't really hold a lot of weight for me.

On top of all of that, corroborating quotes seem to keep being removed from that wikipage, with an edit note that doesn't match the edit, pointing to brigading.

[pmiller2]

I don't see what's dubious about it. There doesn't seem to be any evidence the quote was fabricated, and the effects of US drug policy are apparent to anyone who lifts their head out of the sand.

You don't think Nixon could have disliked blacks, hippies, and drugs, and just found a convenient way to tie them all together while at the same time being able to say "think of the children?" Nixon was many things, but dumb and politically naive are not among them.