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Tay Zonday
@tayzonday
SOME things, like neoliberalism, you can blame on BOTH American political parties. But the “War On Drugs” is a Republican child. Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor confessed in 1994 that it targeted rights-seeking blacks and anti-war hippies, their political enemies: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ Should Jimmy Carter have done more with his supermajority to end the drug war? Sure. Carter’s key legacy is actually neoliberal deregulation. Reagan caught the drug culture-war pass from Nixon and the neoliberal pass from Carter like a champion wide receiver. I grew up in the 1980s. Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was ubiquitous. Drug abuse has *never* varied with race or income-level. Reagan’s super-severe crack VS powder cocaine punishment caused decades of black family separation and federal handouts to corporate prisons. Marijuana prosecution also depopulated disproportionately black areas. This is partly why today’s black family wealth 1/8 that of whites.
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Evan Hudson
@evan-hudson
You’re not wrong. But Harry Anslinger and J Edgar Hoover were bipartisan, working at the behest of intelligence agencies and the DuPont corporation (outlawing hemp in favor of petroleum based synthetics). It’s not even a bipartisan issue, it has more to do with the nature of power held in the corporate-financial-intelligence nexus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger
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