It’s decades later. Million of lives have been ruined. Whole sections of our society has been written off. Mass incarceration exploded. Billions of dollars have gone to law enforcement. As a result, police departments across the country militarized. And for what? It turns out the war on drugs may have been a lie told by the Nixon administration to destroy what it thought were its enemies.

Harpers Magazine recently published an article about drug legalization that generated so much buzz it broke the publication’s website because it included a quote by a former adviser to Nixon admitting the war on drugs was designed to marginalize anti-war protesters and blacks.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” said Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman, who died in 1999. “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.”

The quote is old. Journalist Dan Baum obtained it almost 20 years ago in 1994. It wasn’t published until 2012, but for some reason, it didn’t receive widespread attention until now.

Don’t think for a minute that Nixon was an isolated incident, a single blot in the annals of American history. Nixon had his enemies list. Barack Obama does too — he used the Internal Revenue Service to go after conservative nonprofits. Men just like Nixon have occupied the most powerful seat in the land. They won’t be the last.