And we wonder why blacks believe the CIA got them on crack

[Scooter]

Because they were the intended targets of the war on drugs:

John Ehrlichman, who served 18 months in prison for his central role in the Watergate scandal, was Nixon’s chief domestic advisor when the president announced the “war on drugs” in 1971. The administration cited a high death toll and the negative social impacts of drugs to justify expanding federal drug control agencies. Doing so set the scene for decades of socially and economically disastrous policies.

Journalist Dan Baum wrote in the April cover story of Harper’s about how he interviewed Ehrlichman in 1994 while working on a book about drug prohibition. Ehrlichman provided some shockingly honest insight into the motives behind the drug war. From Harper’s:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “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.

In other words, the intense racial targeting that’s become synonymous with the drug war wasn’t an unintended side effect — it was the whole point.

[Bicycle Bill]

The CIA got them hooked on crack because heroin got too expensive and they weren't shooting up as much as they were supposed to be.

I've also heard that back in the 1950s, once sickle-cell anemia was found to be a disease that disproportionately affected blacks it was allowed to spread unchecked for twenty years in the hopes of eliminating what was perceived to be "the black problem in America".

This just goes to show that if you listen long enough you will hear just about anything.  It still remains your duty to determine whether or not what you are hearing is the truth or not.

-"BB"-

[Scooter]

Of course, but when one of the very small circle of poeple who would have been directly responsible for crafting government policy says "this is the reason we did it", it swings up the needle on the credibility scale significantly.

[Lord Jim]

Of course, but when one of the very small circle of poeple who would have been directly responsible for crafting government policy says "this is the reason we did it", it swings up the needle on the credibility scale significantly.

Ordinarily that would probably be the case, but we have a very unique situation here...

Because every minute of every conversation in the Oval Office and in Nixon's office in the EOB was recorded until mid 1973...(Ehrlichman resigned in April of '73)

And all those conversations have been listened to and catalogued, and if there were anything about such a "plot" it would certainly be public by now...

And if the counter-argument is, "well, Nixon wouldn't have talked about this where he knew he was being recorded" it's a pretty weak argument given what we know he was willing to talk about when he knew he was being recorded...

[Gob]

Ordinarily that would probably be the case, but we have a very unique situation here...

[Meade] Something is either unique, or it is not unique, there are no graduations of "unique".[/Meade]

[MajGenl.Meade]

Thanks, Gob. That ship has already sailed. Due to mass ignorance, it is "acceptable" these days to qualify unique in such a way that unique means nothing more than "somewhat uncommon" rather than "singular".

So LJ is quite correct to say that "we have a very somewhat uncommon situation here".

It does appear to rob the sentence of all useful meaning though, doesn't it?