"Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did," said former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman during a 22-year-old interview published in Harper's Magazine last March.
From its very foundations, the war on drugs was never anything more than a conniving, deceptively crafted policy designed to manipulate the masses into blindly, unquestioningly believing in and thus willfully supporting a self-righteous moral crusade to protect children and society from the perils of substance abuse.
But make no mistake.
The drug war has absolutely nothing to do with such noble ideals, which are merely used to obfuscate and veil the real issue.
Prohibition does, however, have everything to do with social control and systemized racism. Nixon's pal confessed as much.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people," said Ehrlichman.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin ó and then criminalizing both heavily ó we could disrupt those communities," he said.
"We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."
This outrageous revelation should be nothing less than groundbreaking, sending irreversible shockwaves through the public's perception of the failed prohibitionist agenda that has demonstrably failed on just about every ill it has allegedly set out to remedy.
Yet the situation largely remains status quo, arguably even worse. Many Americans were recently more offended by a black football player who took a knee during the nation's anthem than by the decades old and deep-rooted corruption that rots within the core of the country's establishment.
In the U.S., minorities are more likely than ever to be incarcerated for non-violent drug crime, despite the fact they are statistically no more likely to engage in such behaviour than their white majority counterparts.
Yet some people actually pretend the abject poverty many black communities ó which before the drug war fared actually far better ó find themselves in the U.S. is the result of the likes of rap music and not despicable public policy. Just the same as the puritanical generations of the past who claimed Elvis's hip thrusts would herald society's collapse followed shortly by the Apocalypse.
And sadly, as the planet's superpower, America's destructive drug war has largely influenced policy around the world and spread related violence and social ills to every corner of the globe ó including our own backyard.
The good news is there is a better path ó we must but choose to walk it.
Despite the demonstrable success in decriminalizing all drugs from marijuana to heroin in Portugal ó which has seen its drug-related spread of disease and violence plunge dramatically since the more progressive policies were introduced about 15 years ago ó the international community largely remains regressively hell-bent on waging a war that has merely fuelled the flames of violence, death and destruction.
Marching forward with disastrously failed public policy that was founded on outright lies makes absolutely no rational, reasonable or moral sense whatsoever.
How does the saying go ó fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
