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. (Predictably, the late Ehrlichman's children however, disputed the account.) Criticism Both the New York and Michigan statutes came under harsh criticism from both the political left and the political right. William F. Buckley, one of the most conservative public figures in America, was staunchly against it, as well as many in law enforcement, who saw inherent unfairness in placing the non-violent crime of drug trafficking on a par with murder. Economist Murray Rothbard called the laws "draconian: long jail sentences for heroin pushers and addicts. The Rockefeller program, which proved finally to be a fiasco, was the epitome of the belief in treating a social or medical problem with jail and the billy club." The laws also drew intense opposition from civil rights advocates, who claimed that they were racist, as they were applied inordinately to African-Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinos. In 2002, at age 46, Meile Rockefeller was arrested for protesting the Rockefeller drug laws. She was accompanied by her brother, Stuart Rockefeller, and was supported by other members of the family on the issue, including her grandfather's brother, Laurance Rockefeller. Incarceration rates Due to the implementation of the Rockefeller drug laws, incarceration rates were said to have risen since their inception in 1973, 150,000 New Yorkers being imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses. Part of the reason for the rising incarceration rates was due to how the Rockefeller drug laws may have imposed harsher penalties for non-violent drug offenses, but crimes related to drug use did not decrease. Throughout the 1980s this was only made worse with the imposing drug laws on dawning the newly highly popularized drug of crack-cocaine, which is said to have "caused the New York State prison population to triple." As of 1973, the state's prison population was approximately at ten thousand, but with the help of the Rockefeller drug laws, by the year 2002 out of the approximately seventy thousand state inmates, "19,164 were incarcerated for drug offenses" which upon drug offenses alone had nearly doubled the state population