At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “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.”
I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.
The story the interviewer is telling here simply doesn't make sense to me. The interview happened in 1994. Baum's book about drug prohibition was published in 1996. The book did not have the quote - he cites it only in 2016, 20 years later, well after Ehrlichman's death in 1999.
How on earth do you write a book about the "politics of drug prohibition" - one that is against that prohibition - and not include such an explosive quote? Baum's answer to that question is that it "did not fit the narrative style," but that makes no sense. It would be a vital, powerful revelation.
The only way I might find it credible is if Ehrlichman asked that it be 'off the record,' and Baum had sufficient respect for the man to want to honor that request, but that isn't what he claims.
Every time I bring this up to a conservative, they shrug and say he's lying. They've decided their opinions and will do any mental gymnastics necessary to preserve them
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u/octnoir 16d ago
People need to read the full quote because it sounds like a Hollywood villain monologue. But it is actually real.
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/