13th amendment and a history of black slaves. Not complicated. Nixon. His domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman admitted in an interview that the Nixon administration’s “War on Drugs” was designed to target Black communities and anti-war activists.

Here’s the famous quote:

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 Black people with heroin, then, by 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.