Civil Rights Blog: How the War on Drugs Targeted Black's and Hippies

For many years, people have accused the war on drugs of targeting minorities and people in lower income neighborhoods. Recently, one of Richard Nixon's advisers named John Ehrlichman came out and stated that the war on drugs was created by Nixon's campaign in 1968 to target the two most prominent groups that were against his campaign. These groups according to Mr. Ehrlichman were African Americans and Anti-War hippies. He explained that since they could not target these two groups, they decided to start heavily criminalizing marijuana and heroin as they believed it would target both the hippies and African Americans.
What really surprised me when I found this article is how there seems to not be any coverage on it and how nobody seems surprised to hear Ehrlichman's statement. The fact that our federal government got away with targeting African Americans through the War on Drugs is quite honestly embarrassing and very disgraceful.  Also, since legalization and decriminalization of marijuana have become a bigger issue in the United States, I thought there would have been a much bigger focus on the corrupt motives behind the war on drugs. Also, after researching prison reform for my challenge project, I read many articles about the decriminalization of drug possession and how many believe that this would solve many of our criminal justice issues today. In my personal opinion, I agree that incarcerating citizens for drug possession is not helping our prison system. I think that we should spend more money to help those addicted to drugs through rehabilitation programs instead of punishing them. Fortunately, in recent years, many states have started to change the laws and punishments for marijuana. However, I think that instead of focusing on the legalization of cannabis, we should focus more on changing our laws to provide those addicted to drugs with help and rehabilitation.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html

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