Given the contents of the rest of the documentary, which I highly recommend, I'm inclined to believe this statement, but I'm wondering what evidence we have of the FBI's involvement in the drug war and its intentions to specifically target the black community in order to quell civil rights activism. Also, is there evidence, such as statements from Nixon, that the war on drugs main intent was to imprison blacks?
Edit: Full quote below.
I mean, yeah, you know, the 60s was very revolutionary in terms of thought and in terms of imagery: 'black is beautiful,' 'we love ourselves'. And it's documented, it's not even a myth or anything that is a conspiracy theory, that the community was flooded with drugs in order to stop this stuff. I mean Hoover and the FBI, they made sure that the drugs were an influence in the community, and it certainly had its effects - just like how drugs affect your brain, they affected the community and made everything out of focus. Everything fuzzy. The drugs almost had a renaissance when they did the same thing with crack. It was heroin then, it was crack after that, but that's.. you know, people who are poor and oppressed, they focus on survival. The drugs seem like an easy escape route.
I cannot speak to the first half of your question, but I can respond to the following:
Also, is there evidence, such as statements from Nixon, that the war on drugs main intent was to imprison blacks?
In 1994 Dan Braum, a Harper's Magazine reporter, interviewed John Ehrlichman. Contextually, John Ehrlichman was counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon. He organized the group of aides responsible for the Watergate break-in. He ended up serving a year and a half in prison for his contribution to that crime. In the interview, Ehrlichman had this to say:
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.
For what it's worth, other Nixon aides have contested that statement but that breaks the 20-year rule so I will refrain from discussing it further. To underline the intent of Nixon, I additionally refer to this transcript of a recorded conversation between Nixon and Ehrlichman wherein Nixon has this to say:
We're going to (place) more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls...
[Mexican-Americans] don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.
So, it's fairly clear that Nixon himself wasn't overly politically correct, and harbored significant biases against the African-American community of the time. This lends additional credence to Ehrlichman's description of the Nixon's 'War on Drugs' as a racially motivated campaign to discredit Nixon's political enemies.
To present an alternate explanation for the 'War on Drugs', Nixon was apparently equally concerned about the effect 'dope' was having on the country at large. From the same recorded conversation, he had this to say:
Let's look at the strong societies, the Russians. Goddamn, they root [homosexuals] out. They don't let 'em around at all. I don't know what they do with them. Look at this country. You think the Russians allow dope? Homosexuality, dope, immorality are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the communists and left-wingers are clinging to one another. They're trying to destroy us. I know Moynihan will disagree with this, (Atty. Gen. John) Mitchell will, and Garment will. But, goddamn, we have to stand up to this.
So, one could construe that he was concerned about the effects that his political enemies were having on the fabric of American society rather than the race of his enemies. It's clear, however, that Richard Nixon held considerably conservative views on African Americans, and the Social Left.
Please let me know if I can clarify anything, or if this post does not meet the community standards. I'm sorry I wasn't able to answer your main question, but I hope I shed some light on Richard Nixon, the 'War on Drugs' and its intent.
Can you give more context to the quote in your question? I don't think it's clear whether Kweli meant that it's documented that the black community had a lot of drugs, a lot of drugs were sent there, and/or the FBI did it.
This answer touches on it a bit by saying that the government has often turned a blind eye to drug imports when it helped the enemies of our enemies (the communists):
While there is no evidence of a plan or plot by the FBI or any other government agency to deliberate flood Oakland, California, specifically and Black communities more generally with heroin or cocaine, it could be argued, nonetheless, that there is a kind of truth to these allegations in terms of how US drug enforcement policies have caused great harm to African-American communities and also because it has been well documented that the CIA have been complicit in the drug trade.
The thesis that black communities in the US were deliberately flooded with heroin on the orders of J Edgar Hoover appears to be an inference from a 4 March 1968 COINTELPRO memorandum outlining measures to be taken against black nationalist groups. In the memorandum it was stated that:
A final goal should be to prevent the long-range growth of militant black nationalist organizations, especially among youth. Specific tactics to prevent these groups from converting young people must be developed.
measures should be taken to prevent the growth of militant black nationalist organizations among black youths. As stated by, Professor Nkechi Taifu, director of the Howard University Law School Equal Justice Program:
… as we look at the drug trade—crack and heroin—I think that they have been very successful with respect to some of these tactics
When, during the 1970s, there was a heroin epidemic in many American urban areas, the Black Liberation Army kidnapped and killed several drug dealers. They justified these actions on the basis that there was ‘a government conspiracy to flood ghetto communities with heroin and aestheticize its restive denizens’ (claim derived from an interview with Dhoruba Wahad).
This plot was also dramatized in Mario Van Peebles’s film Panther the climax to which implied that when Hoover realised that the Black Panther Party would continue to grow despite the best efforts of his agency he directed the FBI to collaborate with the Mafia to flood Black urban communities with cheap cocaine and heroin.
There is no direct evidence that the FBI worked with the Mafia to bring narcotics into Oakland; however, the film’s suggestion that drug enforcement policies have harmed Black communities does have a factual basis. During the 1990s, when audiences were most likely to have seen Panther, African-Americans were four times more likely than whites to face prison terms for using narcotics. Mario Van Peebles told an Essence magazine interviewer that there is a ring of “truth” to the idea that drug-control policies in the United States are evidence of racial discrimination. Noting the film’s “parallel between the then and now of drugs and alcohol being brought into the Black Community,” Van Peebles added, “These same communities that were insisting on power to the people have been flooded with alcohol and drugs; they’ve been medicated.
Likewise, for some commentators such as Professor Michael Eric Dyson (Sociology, Georgetown University), even in the absence of direct proof, the plot was a ‘plausible answer to why heroin and then crack cocaine flooded into the ghetto’.
As is well documented, the heroin trade was certainly facilitated by the US intelligence services. Until the early 1970s, most of the heroin that arrived in the New York was funneled via Marseille through what is popularly known as the “French Connection”. Marseille had been an important site for the production of drugs prior to World War II, but only became internationally significant in the post-war period. In part, this was due to US concerns about the possible spread of communism to France, especially Marseille (which was also strategically important), where worker’s unions and the Communist Party were quite strong. The strongest force against communism in Marseille was the Corsican Mafia and US agents elected to collaborate with them to break up strikes and attack Communists. In return for this assistance, US agents turned a blind eye to mafia’s criminal activities and the Corsican Mafia consolidated their grip on the port of Marseille and increased the production and sale of heroin. The first heroin laboratory was founded in Marseille in 1951. The Corsican Mafia allied with the US-Italian Mafia (Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano), who had also been the beneficiaries of US strategic policies, who took Turkish opium, processed it into morphine in the Lebanon and then into heroin in Sicily and Marseille. Marseille took over most of the heroin production as it was politically protected and had the labs there had the capacity to produce grade 4 heroin (the type that is soluble and can be injected). The US-Italian and Corsican Mafias then exported the heroin to the US in collaboration with other criminals such as Meyer Lansky. Marseille produced the bulk of the heroin for the US market over the next 20 years or so. However, as the threat of communism in France declined and amid growing frustration that the French authorities were doing little to control this drug trade and US policy, under Nixon, was to close the French Connection in the early 1970s through applying pressure on the French and Turkish governments. This was achieved in 1973. J. Edgar Hoover, of course, had long argued that there was no such thing as the Mafia in the US. It has been speculated that he may have formed relationships with key Mafia figure prior to the war and that he used them as informants in exchange for protection. He apparently met regularly with Mafia leader Frank Costello.
From the 1950s, facilitated by police corruption, heroin use became prevalent in the US especially among minorities in large urban centres. In cities such as Baltimore, and unlike in Harlem, heroin usage increased slowly during the 1950s and much more dramatically from the early 1960s, culminated in a heroin epidemic that only petered out in the early 1970s. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, due to disputes within US Mafia organisations, the Cuban revolution (used as a conduit to transport European heroin to the US) and Robert Kennedy’s campaign against the mafia all interfered with the importation and distribution of heroin. It also led to the development of a new distribution system that would result in a heroin epidemic. The crackdown on the Mafia ended in 1963, with the Kennedy assassination. Carlo Gambino seized control of several Mafia families, gaining the New York waterfront (important as a conduit for European heroin) and later Lucchese empire and the Teamster’s Union at JFK airport. Meantime, the loss of Cuba acted as in incentive to increase other forms of revenue, such as the heroin trade, while the arrival of many Cubans in the US provided manpower for distribution. Further, the 1956 Narcotics Control Act introduced harsh penalties for drug trafficking and this introduced changes into how the Mafia managed the drug trade. Thereafter, they dealt with heroin only at the uppermost level of the commodity chain and turned lower level distribution over to others, especially African-Americans and Puerto Ricans in New York. Similarly ethnic shifts in heroin distribution are evident in Miami (Cuban refugees in the Trafficante organization). In city’s such as Baltimore, local criminals (principally Little Melvin Williams) linked up with New York African-American dealers (e.g. Frank ‘Pee Wee’ Matthews) by the mid-1960s. Reliable access to cheap Turkish heroin by a new breed of mercenary profiteer dealer helped foment a heroin epidemic in the city by the mid/late 1960s.
Didn't have time to do Weber's 'Dark Alliance' series
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