In a 1994 interview, John Erlichman, who was Nixon's chief domestic advisor and one of the architects of Watergate,

described the thought process behind Nixon's declaration of the War on Drugs in

1971.

I quote, the Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti-war 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. Now, Erlichman isn't necessarily a

trustworthy source here. At the time of this interview he was an embittered

felon, hung out to drive by Nixon who spent the second half of his career

smearing the former president in his memoirs and everywhere else besides.

But this acid confession had the ring of truth.

That misbgotten drug war was still with us at the time and is with us today.

Having consumed trillions upon trillions of dollars, destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives,

blighted our inner cities, started actual wars, inspired coups, plunged Mexico and Colombia into decades of instability and violence,

funded the Taliban in Afghanistan, institutionalized a warlike law enforcement culture at home, and entrenched

intractable divisions into domestic life.

And for all of that expenditure of blood and treasure and collateral damage there is ever a new

plague of addiction. The violence has only redoubled. But the war on drugs, like the

wars on communism and now terror, are incredibly resilient and resistant to logic.

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