It took a long tome to get these quotes, and it looks like a discussion may disappear from view, so here goes
According to many, Nixon's aide John Erlichman admitted that the war on drugs was done in part to oppress and subjugate black people. Is this quote accepted as historical fact?
The quote in question:
-
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “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.”
As a background of what I can find, this was said by Erhlichman to Dan Baum in 1994 for one of his book. The book released in 96 did not have the quote because it didn't fit the narrative style.
Fast forward to 2016, and Ehrlichman is now long dead, died in 1999. Dan Baum comes out and reveals this quote in 2016 from Ehrlichman and his family have denied that he said the quote.
Is there a historical consensus regarding whether this quote is true or not? Various articles, documentaries and politicians continually use this quote as evidence that the drug war was intentionally racist.
John Ehrlichman was covicted for multiple counts of perjury (and other crimes) surrounding his involvement in Watergate. He had been instrumental in formation of the group responsible for the scandal and not only lied but also obstructed justice (another conviction). Later claims he made would further question his tendency to present unbiased and factual details about his involvement in the administration. Once credibility is lost irrefutable proof is required when making seemingly outlandish claims, which means he does not get any benefit of the doubt here. It's also noteworthy (as Baum points out) that he had little left to lose when he said this (1994) and would never recover his reputation no matter what he did. Frustrated as he may have been, it doesn't seem likely he was trying to burn everyone involved from spite or revenge.
The author of the book sourcing the quote, Dan Baum, said;
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “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.”
I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.
So we see he was being peppered with "wonky" questions and cut straight to a short answer, which is logically reasonable. The fact that Baum waited to release this "smoking gun" quote is peculiar, but not necessarily unheard of. So it is difficult to say if that's exactly what he said and if he was embellishing in the details or not.
All that said... there is a long history of using drug legislation to maintain societal desires and particularly against minorities. The biggest origination of this was the marijuana legislation targeting the black jazz movement attracting white kids to juke joints in the roaring 20s and 30s plus the Mexican immigrants out west. Even the great Satchmo (jazz king Louis Armstrong) spent 9 days locked up in 1930 for smoking a joint outside a club in California. It was one of the first American celebrity drug arrests in history. So the idea certainly wasn't new.
Id also point out the famous quote by Republican strategist and white house advisor Lee Atwater (which is preserved on audiotape);
Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "N····r, n····r, n····r". By 1968 you can't say "n····r"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N·····r, n·····r". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the backbone.
Lee Atwater in 1981 (off the record) about the Republican "southern strategy" of pivoting towards white supremacy as a platform to gain votes in the south and hiding it as "economic reform". He was a Republican strategist in the 60s and served as advisor to both Reagan and H.W. Bush, serving as RNC chairman in the late 80s and early 90s.
So there are other indications the senior officials of the party were looking for ways to change from the race aspect to a different aspect that accomplished the same results while appearing to not be what it was - racist. This would seem to add some credibility to the claim made.
But in the end, Ehrlichman is simply untrustworthy and his testimony subsequently inadmissible without additional corroboration. Court room 101: Once a perjurer, always a perjurer. That's just good life advice, too.
track me
Thank you for including the Atwater quote. To me that is the most prominent and egregious example of racist policy making
Tremendous answer
awesome answer and thank you :)
While this is a good answer I take issue with this part:
The fact that Baum waited to release this "smoking gun" quote is peculiar, but not necessarily unheard of.
Baum said: ”At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug war.” Baum's book was titled "Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure". Baum told CNN his current reason for not including this story in the book in 1996 was "Baum...said he left out the Ehrlichman comment from the book because it did not fit the narrative style focused on putting the readers in the middle of the backroom discussions themselves, without input from the author."
I’m sorry if this comes across as hyperbolic but...is Dan Baum openly admitting to being the worst journalist alive? He must be, because the only logical alternative is he is making up that story.
If you’re a journalist and a top Nixon advisor tells you the drug war was explicitly designed from the start to be racist while you’re writing a book on the matter, that’s the point you start mentally writing your submission letter for the Pulitzer. That's your career getting made. That’s not far behind finding the lost Watergate tapes or exonerating Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance news story. If it doesn’t fit the narrative style of the book, you change how you are writing the damn book. Not go "well I don't know how to fit this in. Guess I'll just forget about it for 20 years until "after Baum remembered them while going back through old notes for the Harper's story.".
The fact that Baum waited 20 years and after Erlichman's death to publish really stretches the bounds of credibility.
Can you speak to how historians of the Nixon era treat the broader premise that the War on Drugs was an intentionally racist move made to weaken their political enemies? I get that historians might reject Erlichman on his own, but as you mention there's a lot of preexisting historical context for racism in prohibition movements and Atwater's corroboration, as well as Nixon's whole... being.
From the outset I will admit that I cannot answer the question of whether or not this quote is true. (EDIT: please see the brilliant comment above from u/Takeoffdpantsnjaket for this answer). I've seen it before and the fact it's just resurfacing now makes me question its accuracy. However, I am a drug policy and human rights researcher and part of my MA thesis was about the racist origins of drug prohibition in the United States. Perhaps this could give some context into why many people find it easy to accept this quote is real.
The criminalization of drug use in the US has its genesis in the late 19th century, when xenophobia against Chinese immigrants was rampant among white Americans on the West Coast. Even after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 effectively shut down immigration, those who were already settled in the West Coast were viewed as threats by white communities. These fears were fueled in part by unproven rumors Chinese men were using opium to lure white women into sexual slavery. These rumors fueled public calls for cities such as San Francisco to respond by criminalizing the smoking of opium. In 1909, US Congress would adopt the same policy on a federal scale after passing the Anti-Opium Act. Although opium was used for medical and sometimes even recreational purposes throughout American society (particularly among women), it was primarily consumed through injecting or drinking tinctures rather than smoking, which was a means of consumption more popular and thus associated with Chinese immigrants. By criminalizing only the smoking of opium, the law effectively targeted Chinese immigrants by giving law enforcement officials justification for arresting, detaining, and deporting members of their community.
A similar approach would be used against African Americans when the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 prohibited cocaine use. Myths that cocaine was fueling violent behavior among Black people were fueled by sensationalists newspaper articles, such as a 1914 piece by The New York Times titled “Negro Cocaine Fiends are a New Southern Menace: Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Blacks Because They Have Taken to Sniffing”. Headlines such as these coming from popular newspapers reinforced the negative stereotypes whites held about the Black community and resulted in demands for the federal government to do something. Thus, Congress once again made a decision to criminalize a drug on the basis of white xenophobia against a minority group.
The United States continued to use drug prohibition to enforce harsh laws on minority groups in 1930 when the newly formed United States Narcotics Bureau appointed Harry Anslinger as its first commissioner, who immediately started a media campaign seeking the prohibition of marijuana. Just as opium was associated with violent Chinese behavior, and cocaine was associated with violent African American behavior, marijuana at the time was associated with violent behavior among Mexican and Latin American immigrants. Increasingly high racial tensions in border towns led to sensationalist claims by law enforcement about how marijuana promotes lawless behavior among Mexicans. Anslinger, backed by law enforcement, sought to use these fears to argue in favor of marijuana prohibition. Enlisting the help of newspaper mogul and anti-Mexican advocate William Randolph Hearst, he started spreading false myths that marijuana promoted interracial marriage, caused white women to behave provocatively, and fueled Mexican violence. This led to another public outcry, and eventually Congress officially prohibited marijuana with the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, once again legislating based on unsubstantiated claims stemming from racial xenophobia.
In 1968 the United States ratified the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and followed up by passing the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which established the drug scheduling system we still implement today. By the time Nixon officially declared the “War on Drugs” in 1971, drug prohibition was widely accepted in American society and its racist origins nearly forgotten in the public eye. Nixon was instrumental in turning the public rhetoric around drug laws away from controlling the behavior of minority groups towards protecting national security and the rule of law, famously calling drug abuse “public enemy number one.” This allowed millions of dollars to be allocated to law enforcement for the purpose of upholding laws rooted in racist fears without directly evoking the xenophobic rhetoric. White communities eagerly bought into the idea that militarized enforcement of drug criminalization was necessary, in part due to reports of US soldiers becoming addicted to drugs such as heroin in Vietnam. Additionally, rumors continued to persist about drug use leading to violent behavior among Black and other minority groups, especially throughout the Civil Rights Movement. The origins of drug prohibition were unimportant to the masses, but many suspect the Nixon Administration knew exactly what they were doing by passing policies which would strengthen law enforcement’s ability to legally harass Black and other minority communities.
I'll end there because I think there's plenty written on how the War on Drugs fuels systemic racism and militarized policing, and admittedly I have not done enough research on Nixon himself to provide sourced information about why he might consider Black Americans "enemies" as Ehrlichman described.
TL;DR: Drug prohibition in the US originated as a means to control and discriminate against minority communities by criminalizing certain behaviors over others. While it's difficult to say whether Ehrlichman's quote is accurate, the history and current awareness about the racial disparities fueled by the War on Drugs can make it easy for people who read the quote to accept it as accurate.
Sources:
Redford, Audrey, and Benjamin Powell. "Dynamics of Intervention in the War on Drugs: The Buildup to the Harrison Act of 1914." The Independent Review 20, no. 4 (2016)
Block, Frederic. Disrobed: An inside Look at the Life and Work of a Federal Trial Judge. Eagan, MN: West, 2012.
Herer, Jack, Leslie Cabarga, and Todd McCormick. Jack Herers The Emperor Wears No Clothes. Austin, TX: Ah Ha Pub., 2010.
Niesen, Molly. "Public Enemy Number One: The US Advertising Councils First Drug Abuse Prevention Campaign." Substance Use & Misuse 46, no. 7 (May 06, 2011):