Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
Nixon's "War on Drugs" continues to terrorize Americans; it's time to drive a stake through this 50-year-old legal Frankenstein's monster that has killed so many Americans for no good reason
No More No-Knock - Justice for Amir Locke Protest - Downtown Minneapolis
(Image by Tony Webster) Details DMCA
Another day, another dead civilian from a no-knock police raid, this time 22-year-old Amir Locke in Minneapolis. It's Breonna Taylor all over again.
All because Republican president and criminal Richard Nixon decided to create a phony national "moral panic" that would win him the 1972 election (it worked, by the way).
Binge-watch some cop shows from the 1950s till the early 1970s and you'll see something very different from today's SWAT teams executing an estimated 70,000 no-knock warrants every year. Back then, cops would knock on a door, the guy inside would say, "Do you have a warrant?" and the cops would either produce it or leave.
For those too young to remember, Nixon's racist "War on Drugs" campaign strategy was the turning point when today's abomination started. Prior to that neither SWAT teams nor no-knock warrants even existed in any meaningful way.
Nixon, elected in 1968 after sabotaging LBJ's efforts to end the Vietnam War, intended to run for re-election in 1972. Yet by 1971 he and his war were increasingly unpopular, so he huddled with his top advisors Haldemann and Ehrlichman to come up with a strategy to win the upcoming election.
The product of those planning sessions burst into public view on June 17, 1971 when Nixon officially rolled out his brand-spanking-new "War on Drugs."
Telling Americans that drug abuse both in Vietnam and here at home had "assumed the dimensions of a national emergency," Nixon started a brand new agency called the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention.
As the Nixon Foundation notes at their website, Nixon:
""declared drug abuse 'public enemy number one.' 'In order to fight and defeat this enemy,' he continued, 'it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.' With that statement, the 'war on drugs' began."
And, indeed, it took on the dimensions of a war, only this time a war against both the Constitution and the American people. Literally, as Nixon's top advisor would later tell us.
The Constitution guarantees us a right to privacy and restates what had, in British common law, been historically called the "Castle Doctrine."
Sir Edward Coke, in The Institutes of the Laws of England, laid it out in 1628: "For a man's house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man's home is his safest refuge]." As I note in The Hidden History of Big Brother, Coke was citing a law ratified in 1275 by England's King Edward III.
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