Apparently marijuana was in the files. They were speaking how people who smoke marijuana are harder to manipulate because it makes us open our mind and question things more, whereas alcohol does the opposite effect. Which is why alcohol is promoted while marijuana is demonized.

    • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      John Ehrlichman, White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon.

      “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.”

    • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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      but there are politicians from back in the day recorded saying they stigmatized weed to counteract the politics of blacks, hippies, etc.

      it still never ceases to amaze me that president nixon admitted to doing this and people still believe that the drugs are bad.

        • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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          that is the only explanation that makes sense to me; but the scale of this kind of ignorance becomes staggering when you consider the sheer volume of information that the american gov’t released thanks to things like the freedom of information act.

      • Castor_Troy [comrade/them,he/him]@hexbear.net
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        6 days ago

        Well said. I forgot that point that it was even more concrete than how I stated it. The strategy was to weaken the left. The tactic was to do that by stigmatizing communities associated with the left because of their association with weed.