I was skeptical of this quote, because for some reason Dan Baum sat on it for twenty years instead of publishing it in his book on the subject. Huffington Post,

I was skeptical of this quote, because for some reason Dan Baum sat on it for twenty years instead of publishing it in his book on the subject. Huffington Post, however, asked him about that: Baum explained to The Huffington Post why he didn’t include the quote in his 1996 book, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. “There are no authorial interviews in [Smoke and Mirrors] at all; it’s written to put the reader in the room as events transpire,” Baum said in an email. “Therefore, the quote didn’t fit. It did change all the reporting I did for the book, though, and changed the way I worked thereafter.” The quote does, however, appear in the 2012 book The Moment, a collection of “life-changing stories” from writers and artists. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nixon-drug-war-racist_us_56f16a0ae4b03a640a6bbda1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nixon-drug-war-racist_us...)