In actuality it was always about maintaining a legal and socially acceptable avenue for continuing this country’s legacy of racism and slavery.
Sorta, in actuality it was created with the intent to get around the 1st amendment protections and silence the civil rights and anti war dissenters of the time, the relevant quote about this is below. After the Vietnam War ended and the Civil Rights Act got passed it turned into what you describe it is today.
"You want to know what this was really all about? 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.”
This is pretty much reaffirming my position that the only mercy and compassion that evangelicals should ever get is the wall.