Maybe not murder with impunity, but imprison with impunity. Which is pretty bad when you consider how privately run prisons factor in. > “You want to know what

Maybe not murder with impunity, but imprison with impunity. Which is pretty bad when you consider how privately run prisons factor in. > “You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. “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. A country that is supposedly about freedom finds reasons to keep people in prisons. Imprisoning people for things like possession of marijuana (while we over-prescribe opiates) is unbelievably cruel. [0]: https://www.drugpolicy.org/press-release/2016/03/top-adviser-richard-nixon-admitted-war-drugs-was-policy-tool-go-after-anti https://www.drugpolicy.org/press-release/2016/03/top-adviser...