“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.” That’s a quote from John Ehrlichman who was domestic policy chief for President Richard Nixon at the time the war on drugs got started. If that was really the goal, it definitely worked. But the war on drugs has done a hell of lot more damage than that.

+ NYT: Ithaca’s plan to fight heroin: Open a site for using it.

+ “The collections for a single month exceed state economists’ projections for the entire year.” Which is another way of saying Oregonians are buying a lot of recreational marijuana.