“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “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 (served as White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon)

I don't think that's the whole story, but that's at least part of it

In the US more people than any any other state in history (save for the worst period of Nazi Germany) are kept as basically slaves in jails and prisons on drug charges and they are loaned out to capitalists. A significant section of the underclass is held down by drug use where they are sedated both personally and politically, forced into the worst jobs, or the reserve army of labor.

This isn't a conspiracy though. Like the prisons aren't conspiring with the cartels. It's all just capitalists trying to make money by screwing someone else over and seeing both extremely vulnerable drug producers and drug users and taking advantage of them. Capitalism rewards this so it's reproduced until it isn't possible to squeeze any more juice out of it.

Slavery is legal for prisoners, so they made more prisoners by defining what is illegal and enforcing it on minority communities.

It's useful for an imperialist ruling class to keep drug trafficking and drug traffickers around, it's possible that some are powerful enough that they are effectively on the same level. We're not so far removed from things like British opium imports to China having a huge effect on quality of life and such. They can disrupt other nations and be used as a pretext for sanctions/occupations/foreign aide to facilitate god knows what.

For domestic operations it's slush money and can be politicized. Its illegality puts people in situations where they'll be more likely to do anti-social actions benefiting or on behalf of clandestine operations. It's also a great cover story for any violence that might erupt between elements of this, for lack of a better term, "deep political network".

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “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.”

I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.

from https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

EDIT: oops FnordPrefect posted this already

What's the materialist explanation for this moralistic taboo?

(CW: n-word slurs, racism)

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/

I believe that's most of it at a material level. Years before legalization was even a thing in many states, when a bunch of affluent white kids get pulled over for speeding or drunk driving, the weed stink got a verbal warning, if that. Compare that to the sentences (and career-prospect ruining aftermath) of "urban" kids getting caught smoking a joint.

Also, notice how there's just about zero enforcement of anti-drug laws and policies if it's white (or "honorary white") Silicon Valley techbros trying new and exciting custom drugs (particularly on their economically coerced company) at their little SV parties?

(CW: SV)

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/brotopia-silicon-valley-secretive-orgiastic-inner-sanctum

The so-called "war on drugs" is a war on the poor and on minorities. The material goal is to oppress the poor and minorities and keep the flow of prison labor coming.

All the people you mention as being against drug use make their money/employment from prohibition.

The public generally opposes legalisation because they rightly see that drug addiction causes enormous harms, and they want to keep that away from their children and communities. But there is a kind of vicious circle here in that the harms of addiction, and indeed addiction itself, is largely driven by prohibition. Example: compare legal methadone with illegal heroin (the former is not culturally desirable, and those who adhere to a methadone program are often healthy enough and successfully quit using, etc. Likewise the methadone program is not a driver of organised and petty crime).
‘Lighter’ drugs like LSD are victims of cultural puritanism and decades of drug war propaganda. A hangover of Victorian era morality.

To some extent the drug war was designed to criminalise minorities and the counter culture. In any case, drug prohibition was allowed to expand whereas other prohibitions (gambling, alcohol, sex etc) were wound back because it primarily affected those outside mainstream white culture. Of course that’s no longer the case, which is probably why it’s slowly starting to be wound back now.

There is also less political will behind drug legalisation because there is no power behind it - drug addicts can’t organise, and any kind of drug legalisation that aimed to minimise harm would have to forego a profit motive. So it just lingers on as a problem whereas other social issues that don’t directly antagonise capitalist economics make progress.

drugs are powerful. drugs are necessary for human health and comfort. period. the only thing more powerful is the ability to craft and enforce drug policy.

drug policy lets those in power decide who is legitimate and who is not. drug policy elevates some, generally domestic, capital formations and lets them extract extremely high rents from the masses. the prohibition of drugs and the "war" that has wrought is about so much more than just the carceral state inside the US, though those are the gears with the sharpest, most visible teeth.

https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/17990?login=false

One aspect is that it provides the pretext for imperialism except with different window-dressing.

The US doesn't occupy and control parts of South America and especially Mexico by forcing policy and stationing its military there to enforce a system of domination over the subjugated population, instead it creates a collaborative partnership where policy designed to address the problems with drug production and trafficking as well as cartels is developed and enforced with the US spearheading it and these policies are backed up by three-letter agencies who act as a pseudo military occupying force (if not an outright military). It's totally different, see?

Another aspect is that US government agencies can weaponise the drug trade, for example unleashing the crack epidemic on poor people and people of colour or–conversely–to use as political leverage such as how the US occupying forces raised up and protected a poppy based pseudo-narcostate in Afghanistan to create a countervailing force against the Taliban while they were on the back foot and operating mostly as an insurgent force (with some reports from Americans in the armed forces claiming that they would act as private security forces for certain drug operations in Afghanistan), and it is also used as a means to generate dark money to use to fund efforts and programs outside of their remit afforded them by congress and outside of the meagre efforts to scrutinise them. The CIA is the big name in this and the Iran-Contra Affair is the most obvious example. If drugs are scarce and they are dangerous then that drives the price of them way up and so the CIA can do shit like fund paramilitary death squads, coups, and black sites with money that congress and auditors will never ever see.

It's also worth keeping in mind that we should avoid slipping into a sort of vulgar materialist analysis here by presuming that there aren't a lot of different factors that exist, often in contradiction to one another, and the influence of ideology can still be very strong despite capitalism wanting to do what capitalism always does.

Some examples of how ideology holds a firm grip on society and can prevail over the "logic" of capitalism and the basic material factors are ones such as preventing and strictly limiting women's employment until fairly recently, and in a similar vein preventing women from having bank accounts and credit cards or the taboo from a century ago around women smoking in public, and of course legalising gay marriage.

Sometimes the prevailing force isn't necessarily a materialist one but one that is squarely rooted in culture, belief, and custom (i.e. ideology), so it's important to not understate the influence of ideology even as materialists.

Some stimulants like caffeine aren't taboo because they're just addictive enough and just effective enough that they affect productivity positively. Alcohol has had a complicated history all over the world, and I think in a world where the capitalists had absolute power it'd be banned too. All the other dependence creating drugs mess up workers too much to allow them to run free.

I guess that begs the question of why non-addictive psychedelics are taboo, and I suspect that one doesn't have a very good materialist explanation.

So strong is the taboo they will ruin your life and exile you from mainstream society for doing something recreational.

except for all the recreational drugs that are normalized like caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, or anything a doctor has written a special note for that says white use is permitted

It's important to note that it wasn't just drugs, it was ALL "crime" that became over policed and overpunished.

On top of what's already been mentioned here, the CIA have operated what is likely the largest drug trafficking operation in the world since as early as the 1950s (pretty much since the agency's inception). Busting on competition also serves to artificially increase market prices so they can rake in more dark money for their off the books operations. (See Politics of Heroin in South East Asia - D. Valentine)

Neocolonialism.

It's a way to create a moral panic to funnel more money cops and oppress disenfranchised commodities further.