While the war on drugs was officially inaugurated by Nixon in June
1971, the United States has used drug laws to selectively target
specific communities for more than a century. In the 1870s, anti-opium
laws were aimed at Chinese immigrants. In the 1910s and 1920s,
anti-cannabis laws introduced in the Midwest and Southwest targeted
Mexican Americans and migrants.

As John Ehrlichman, a top Nixon aide, revealed in a 1994 interview
that was published in 2016, the war on drugs itself was designed to
target Black people and "hippies":

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.

https://www.vera.org/news/fifty-years-ago-today-president-nixon-declared-the-war-on-drugs

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