War on drugs  

"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 as quoted in "Legalize it all" Harper's Magazine, April 2016

"Demand for narcotics seemed to be relatively inelastic, despite a domestic agenda of law enforcement and treatment ... Soon producers in Asia's “Golden Triangle“ and “Golden Crescent” and in Mexico acted to fill the gap left by the ... illicit narcotics (as well as marijuana and cocaine) were once again plentiful on American streets (McCoy & Block, 1992). Nixon's difficult balancing act in regard to Turkey became a consistent feature of American drug policy in the post-Anslinger years."--Drug War American Style: The Internationalization of Failed ... (2014) by Jurg Gerber, ‎Eric L. Jensen