Today I was going through my old facebook posts–articles that I had shared, funny videos of cats–and came across something that I had posted a while back with hopes that it would spark discussion. Unfortunately, this was not the case, as no one had even bothered to leave any sign that they saw, much less read the article.

Now I could go about focusing entirely on the labors of maintaining your interests in a world that few can entertain, posting things on social media regardless of the perceived futility. However, I think that this time I wish to instead discuss the content of the article itself, given that it has dire implications for our country, and offers some exclusive insight on human progress.

Before we go any further, here are two articles. And yes, I realize that one of these articles is from Wikipedia. You can look up a different summary on Google if you desire more scholarly sources.

–https://www.minds.com/blog/view/562766803856531456
–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman

The first article entails a quote derived from John Ehrlichman, former member of Nixon’s cabinet and the “brainchild” of the Watergate scandal. When questioned by the press about the war on drugs, John stated that The War on Drugs was created entirely to target two different subgroups of people.

I am sure that you read the quote in the above articles, but in any case, here is what he said.

“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, 1994

Given that John Ehrlichman was “counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon”, this provides damning evidence that at one point the government interceded in the burgeoning of a cultural revolution, on top of oppressing and prosecuting two different subgroups within America, for the sake of perpetuating a war. This started in 1968, and the effects of anti-drug legislation during that period have completely crippled both of those groups to this day.

Now, we have two choices here. We could forget entirely that this event happened, that the government was complicit in removing the freedom integral to specific subgroups in the interest of vilifying their movements and arresting their leaders, and move on with the aim to try and make this country better.  If we let petty politics get in the way of the greater good, if we let entrenched politics lead us in circles, we will truly fall from grace.

The second choice, of course, is to acknowledge and use what we learned from those long years in order to prevent oppressive forces from overtaking this country again. Regardless of what you think of marijuana for instance, you have to acknowledge that people are going to smoke it regardless of what you personally believe. To prosecute them for this would be you implementing your influence to negatively impact someone else’s life. While drugs like heroin are obviously detrimental and addictive to the people using them, criminalizing the users will only perpetuate the problem. The real aim should be to prevent people from getting addicted, from a medical standpoint, so that they can be free to utilize their own autonomy for their own ends.

In the end, as has been demonstrated over and over again, you cannot completely dictate what a population does from a governmental standpoint, and in the end the only way forward is evolution through leaders who are open to change.

Even under the oppressive energies of anti-drug legislation, drugs like marijuana have induced some of the most intense cultural revolutions that our country has ever seen. An example of this would be the growth of rock climbing during the peak of the hippy revolution, where people quit their jobs and drove out the Yosemite to set bare-rock climbing records that will remain unbroken for decades. It set off a wave of originality and progress for humans in a time when many adult humans would simply grow up, obtain a 9-5 job, and retire. To this day the people that originally broke away from mainstream society to climb have created an ever growing culture of outdoors-loving individuals who live and commune in Yosemite.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3784160/      (Netflix Documentary on Yosemite)

In the end, I am left with a grim sense of awe. This country, the land of the free, the place that for the longest time I considered to be progressing to perfection, at least from a peace standpoint. To find out that at one time we had such intense and violent interactions between authority and its citizens, and, to a lesser extent, in 2017, is disappointing and begs the question: are we all truly doing as much as we can to ensure a bright future for everyone?