An intriguing quote by a former aide to disgraced US President Richard Nixon is making headlines.
Harper’s Magazine reports a 1994 conversation with John Ehrlichman, a key White House policy adviser, in which Ehrlichman claims that the “war on drugs” Nixon declared in 1971 was rooted in racism.
Ehrlichman is quoted as saying: “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 criminalising 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.”
If accurate, the quote appears to confirm what many critics of US drug policy have long alleged – that there is a racial bias built into the way drug crime is handled by the justice system.
But what are the hard facts?
The analysis
Drug use
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s latest national survey of drug use suggests a similar prevalence of drug use among blacks and whites.
Some 12.4 per cent of black people aged 12 or over said they had used illegal drugs in the past month. For white people it was 10.4 per cent:
