You know Britta Phillips from the bands Luna and Dean & Britta, but now she has a debut solo album, Luck Or Magic. The record features five Phillips originals alongside covers of songs by the Cars, Evie Sands, Fleetwood Mac, Dennis Wilson and ABBA’s Agnatha Fältskog. Phillips will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.
Phillips: I’m talking about the actual war on drugs, not the band. I picked up Harper’s magazine a couple of weeks ago (I get around to this activity maybe every other month these days) and had my mind blown by the piece “Legalize It All” by Dan Baum. I’m not talking about the legalization part, I’m talking about Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool to defeat his “two enemies: the antiwar left and back people,” as explained by John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, when the writer interviewed him for a book about the politics of drug prohibition back in 1994. Ehrlichman continued “By getting the public to associate the hippies with marihuana 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.” Now whether you’re for or against the legalization of drugs, I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing that this Machiavellian scheme has got to go.
Video after the jump.
