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Comment by dontbeevil1992 | Hacker News Reader

dontbeevil1992

"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."

- John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon's Chief Domestic Advisor

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Maybe. Or maybe not:

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

-- Ehrlichman died in 1999, but his five children in questioned the veracity of the account.

“We never saw or heard anything from our dad, John Ehrlichman, that was derogatory about any person of color,” wrote Peter Ehrlichman, Tom Ehrlichman, Jan Ehrlichman, Michael Ehrlichman and Jody E. Pineda in a statement provided to CNN.

“The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.” --

Just pointing out that your quote is an alleged quote, and may or may not be accurate.

Of course it's a powerful (alleged) quote, but it's far from the only evidence that the War on Drugs is not based, even in principle, on social good, but rather to serve powerful interests such as private prisons and police.

As far as the pushback from the family, I would just say that it wouldn't be the first time that someone is different at work than with his family. The worst people in history still sometimes had families and pets who they treated much better than minorities and political enemies.

Furthermore, Ehrlichman may not have been racist enough to spout it unprompted, the way Nixon is recorded as being. But he would not be the first person on Capitol Hill to be craven enough to go along with racism when it helps them attain or maintain power.

He made that statement in this interview to a Harpers contributer in 1994: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

That article is from 2016, long after Ehrlichman died. There was no Harper's interview with Ehrlichman in 1994.

> That article is from 2016, long after Ehrlichman died. There was no Harper's interview with Ehrlichman in 1994.

Those are facts. Here are some more facts:

* The article is written in 2016 by Dan Baum.

* GP refers to "a Harper's contributor". That person is Dan Baum.

* In the article in 2016, Dan Baum is relating his experience meeting John Ehrlichman in 1994.

* In the article in 2016, Dan Baum claims that John Ehrlichman, during their meeting in 1994, said the quoted text.

* An interview with a Harper's contributor need not be a Harper's interview

* It is possible to publish, in 2016, a statement made by someone in 1994

Another fact is that if the statement were made in 1994, there were five years to publish it while Ehrlichman might still be around to dispute it. Oddly enough, another fact is that this didn't come out until Ehrlichman was dead for seventeen years. Stake your reputation on such things if you like, but I think there's better material to use to make the point. Ehrlichman had a lot to answer for, but I'm not willing to pile on in this case based on something someone remembers from twenty years prior.

This is true. Ultimately, you have to multiply by the likelihood that this Dan Baum fellow is honest and has recollected correctly, using either memory or notes.

The "Banality of Indifference" is very real

Curious. I wondered what other children would say about their parents, so I googled someone I know to be reprehensible.

Edda Goering on her father, the famous Hermann Goering:

> "My only memories of him are such loving ones. I cannot see him any other way."

> "The things that happened to the Jews were horrible, but quite separate from my father."

We, of course, are well-informed and know that "the things that happened to the Jews" are not, in fact, "quite separate from her father". I suspect that children of people are not reputable character references.

Then, why are there several countries with much stricter drug laws than the US (e.g. Singapore has the death penalty).

Many of them are outside of the US sphere of influence.

https://drugabuse.com/blog/the-20-countries-with-the-harshes...

I don't see this as a counterargument for two reasons.

First, how do the actions of other countries have bearing on what is true about the history of our country?

Second, I don't know the details, but seems to me that powerful people in other countries could, just like the U.S., be reaping political and financial benefits from criminalizing drugs.

There was no argument in the first place other than a disputed comment.

This often-repeated quote is almost certainly fake.

A single person claims to have heard this statement and waited until after Mr. Ehrlichman's death, decades later, to publish the quote.

tl;dr - You're spreading misinformation because it confirms your biases

He made that statement in this interview to Harpers in 1994: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

No, it is the memory of an interview for a book (which, AFAICT, was never published) back in 1994, and that memory was posted to a Harper's article in 2016 (I mean, it's right there in the URL), long after Ehrlichman was dead. As the inexplicably-downvoted GP comment says, there is no traceable basis for this quote. As far as we know, the author just made it up. The more likely case is that, at best, it is from old interview notes from 1994.

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