Why the war on drugs was started

 The Hartmann Report -  The war on drugs, since Richard Nixon declared it, has been about controlling political power by breaking up black communities and the dissident left. The people who were involved, the architects and the leaders in the war on drugs, admitted it and even bragged about it.

Before he died, Nixon counsel and former assistant to the president John Ehrlichman told author Dan Baum: "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."

The Nixon administration signed the Controlled Substances Act into law in 1970, officially codifying the war on drugs into federal law, and then used the war on drugs to help politically (and often physically) assassinate community leaders, and to fracture communities by removing individuals from society and throwing them in prison.

By 1973, more than 300,000 people were being arrested every year under the law, and a disproportionate number of those were African-Americans.

In the 1930s, Harry J. Anslinger served as the first commissioner of the US 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 US, 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.”