And so it was that in the span of just a few years, the Nixon administration was able to successfully mold its campaign of law and order in response to the civil disobedience of the sixties into a full-fledged war on drugs. And with his insistence on a link between rising crime and drugs—heroin, specifically—Nixon thoroughly racialized his war, making it effectively a war on Black users, Black dealers, Black communities. The Office of Drug Abuse and Law Enforcement performed six thousand drug arrests in its first eighteen months, and the majority of those arrests were carried out on Black
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