Nixon and the drug war

The so-called War on Drugs isn’t as popular lately as it once was, and a report in the new issue of Harper’s magazine is getting attention for a new theory on how it began, during the Nixon administration.

Reporter Dan Baum looks at the origins of the policy, and offers a bizarre quote from John Erlichman, Nixon’s infamous, and once imprisoned, domestic policy adviser. Harper’s editor Ellen Rosenbush writes that Erlichman told Baum the Nixon team cooked up the war on drugs to discredit the main groups who disagreed with it — African-Americans and young protestors: