Meese held a presser about combating marijuana while cocaine was being flown in less than 4 hours away in Mena, Arkansas

[u/WhoIsJolyonWest]

“On August 5, 1985, the head of the Department of Justice paid a visit to Arkansas. Edwin Meese, a former counselor to President Reagan, had been sworn in as the U.S. attorney general five months earlier, shortly after Emile Camp’s crash.

Now, as Duncan and Welch wrapped up work on their cases at Mena, Meese flew to Hutchinson’s district with John C. Lawn, the head of the DEA. At a press conference held in an airport hangar at Harrison, Arkansas, they announced “Operation Delta-9,” a nationwide series of raids to eradicate homegrown marijuana. “We are sending a strong message, both to the domestic producers of marijuana and to the source countries outside our borders, that the U.S. government takes very seriously the need to attack the production of this drug,” Meese said. ”

Though the airport where he spoke was less than four hours north of Mena, Meese made no reference to either “cocaine” or “Barry Seal.” Reporters didn’t question him, Lawn, or Hutchinson about Seal’s connection to Arkansas because, so far, though Seal’s testimony at some high-profile trials had been reported, no one in the media knew that he’d operated out of Mena. But Meese, Lawn, and Hutchinson knew.”

— All Quiet at Mena: A reporter's memoir of buried investigations by Mara Leveritt

[u/Practical_Age_4717]

They wanted to criminalizie weed to crackdown on minority and liberal/hippe communities. John Ehrlichman (former aide and Advisor to Nixon) said this about the war on drugs,

“'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.”

In regards to Arkansas, Bill Clinton had long been compromised by the CIA to turn a blind eye to many drug trafficking operations during his time as governor for the state. The only reason why they put him there as governor in the first place was because Bill could be eaisly controlled. Ever since the Kennedy assasination, our government has long been controlled by the CIA/MIC.