"The Nixon Campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, 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. 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."
In other words, Nixon and the GOP used the War on Drugs to help politically assassinate community leaders, and to fracture communities by removing individuals from society and throwing them in prison.
The Nixon administration signed the Controlled Substances Act into law in 1970, officially codifying the war on drugs into federal law.
By 1973, over 300,000 people were being arrested every year under the law, and a disproportionate number of those were African Americans.
The plan went hand in hand with the Republican "Southern Strategy," just listen to former Republican strategist Lee Atwater describing how that worked.
Nixon and his advisers didn't invent the racist war on drugs though. Using drug enforcement as a way to oppress minority communities already had a 40 year precedent.
In the 1930s, Harry J. Anslinger served as the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which eventually became the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Back then, he reportedly claimed:
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
He also more bluntly complained that "Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."
Just like Lee Atwater described, the language had changed by 1970, but the ideas were the same.
Nixon wasn't the first to use drug enforcement as a way to oppress minorities in America, but he did step up the racist War on Drugs and sign it into law -- and every president since then has continued and even expanded it.
According to the Justice Policy Institute, approximately 500,000 people were serving time for drug offenses in state and federal prisons and jails in 2008.
Unsurprisingly, the NAACP reports that 38% of people arrested for drug offenses are black, and that 59% of drug offenders in state prisons are black.
The War on Drugs is costing us tens of billions in federal and state tax dollars every year, and the only results have been millions of undue criminal convictions that ruin lives, destroy communities, and undermine our democracy.
That's why it's time to end the racist war on drugs.
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