Reefer Madness Redux

“When the Great Scorer comes to list the main downers of our time, the Nixon Inauguration will have to be ranked Number One.” Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail ‘72

Like many people of my generation, I detested Richard Nixon and just about everything he ever stood for. Nixon was an evil dude, and he surrounded himself with authoritarian creeps like H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson. Bad times, unrest in the cities and on college campuses. Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. King had been murdered and the heart seemed to have been ripped from the nation.

Like Donald Trump today, Nixon was a Law & Order guy, a tough talking high sheriff who would lock criminals up and bury the key. To rid the nation of the scourge of dangerous drugs, Nixon and his henchman launched the War on Drugs. This bad idea is still with us, all these years later, and our prisons, many of them operated by corporations for profit,  are filled to bursting with former users and junkies.

Nixon’s War on Drugs was erected on a foundation of out and out racism. An interview with John Ehrlichman that came to light recently makes the real intent of the War on Drugs crystal clear. Here’s Ehrlichman, speaking with breathtaking candor in the mid 1990’s:

"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."

There it is, in all its sinister glory. A diabolical scheme hatched by a paranoid government to put white, pot-toking hippies and black smack junkies back in their boxes and slam the lid. Only Nixon, I think, only that rat bastard was evil enough to conceive of such a plan, and the consequences plague the nation -- not to mention Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, to name a few -- to this day. Obama came out the other day and said that drug use and abuse is more of a health issue than a criminal one, a good start, albeit way too late, but I wonder if he would have said anything if record numbers of white folk weren’t getting hooked on heroin and prescription opioids. When a social problem impacts the pale skins, the government acts and money begins to flow toward solutions.

God, why am I thinking about Nixon? It’s a lovely day outside my window and I’m free of the work clock, there’s lots of cold Lagunitas in the fridge, a couple of bags of sunflower seeds, but more to the point, the current political circus is awful enough without drifting back to our dark past. If I start thinking about Nixon I will invariably think about Henry Kissinger and Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Millions of people killed. Nixon and Kissinger, W. Bush and Cheney -- a gallery of unindicted war criminals. I’m not sure the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Kissinger is considered a sage in some circles; W and Cheney run free still, make speeches for good money, and never bother to hang their heads in shame.

The horror, the horror, the horror!