The War on Drugs was started by Nixon as a tool to silence those he considered his enemies, e.g., hippies and people of color: "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and

The War on Drugs was started by Nixon as a tool to silence those he considered his enemies, e.g., hippies and people of color: "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," Ehrlichman told journalist Dan Baum in 1994. "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, 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."