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Nixon aide: 'War on Drugs' created to target 'black people,' anti-war protesters

By Shawn Price
Journalist Dan Baum says John Ehrlichman, former high-ranking aide to President Richard Nixon, revealed to him in a 1994 interview that the drug war was created by Nixon to target anti-war protesters and African Americans. The 22-year-old revelation is part of a new article for Harper's Magazine. UPI file photo
Journalist Dan Baum says John Ehrlichman, former high-ranking aide to President Richard Nixon, revealed to him in a 1994 interview that the drug war was created by Nixon to target anti-war protesters and African Americans. The 22-year-old revelation is part of a new article for Harper's Magazine. UPI file photo | License Photo

NEW YORK, March 22 (UPI) -- A top aide to President Richard Nixon said the "War on Drugs" was created to punish anti-war protesters and African-Americans, according to a report in Harper's Magazine.

Journalist Dan Baum says John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, made the admission in a 1994 interview, recently revisited for Baum's piece on the War on Drugs in Harper's.

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Baum says Ehrlichman told him the two groups were seen as Nixon's biggest enemies.

"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," Ehrlichman said.

"Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did," he said.

Ehrlichman was part of the Watergate coverup and served 18 months in prison for conspiracy and perjury. Nixon resigned rather than be removed from office.

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"This is a frightening confirmation of what many of us have been saying for years. That this was a real attempt by government to demonize and criminalize a race of people," Rev. Al Sharpton told the Daily News. "And when we would raise the questions over that targeting, we were accused of all kind of things, from harboring criminality to being un-American and trying to politicize a legitimate concern."

The 22-year-old interview was part of Baum's research for his 1997 book Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. Baum said he kept the damning quotes out of the book because they "didn't fit."

Ehrlichman died in 1999.

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