In case you missed it, over the weekend Harpers writer Dan Baum unleashed a jaw-dropping quote from John Ehrlichman, a policy advisor to the Nixon White House, as part of a excellent cover story arguing for the legalization of all drugs:

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.

Asked why Ehrlichman said what he said, Baum told the Huffington Post that he was one of those former officials "eager to unburden themselves, once they no longer have a dog in the fight."

One wonders what advisors in the White House today may have to say decades from now about, for example, the drone killing program, when they feel the desire to "unburden" themselves.