I think you're being both too cynical and not cynical enough here, in that the more important causes are stupider and more petty than you're making out. Nixon

I think you're being both too cynical and not cynical enough here, in that the more important causes are stupider and more petty than you're making out. Nixon did very much like that he was screwing over black people and hippies with the war on drugs but the main reason he pursued this was that rising crime rates were freaking out voters. They wanted to vote for people with a plan to fix this but crime was mostly a state and local issue. By claiming that cracking down on drugs would solve crime Nixon was able to claim that he had a solution to crime. But the reason we have such weird laws about marijuana in particular is that "marijuana induced insanity" was a popular criminal defense in some places prior to criminalization and that led most people at the time to think of marijuana primarily in terms of inducing violent crime.