Ehrlichman on Nixon campaign...

 “As John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top domestic advisers, admitted years afterwards, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people … 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.” Over time, though, it wasn’t weed-smoking white hippies who would bear the brunt of anti-drug policies; it was black Americans. Prison populations began to climb significantly by 1980, with major racial disparities in sentencing. Reagan announced his War on Drugs in 1982, and spending on antidrug law enforcement that mostly targeted black communities quickly skyrocketed”