I don't want to be on the bandwagon of dogging any president or anybody in positions where they have all these different constituencies.

I am glad that people are trying to have a rational conversation about drugs.

My critique of how we deal with drugs in society is just that - that we use these anecdotes to apply to everyone and the anecdotes are not representative.

When you have the national narrative being "crack is awful and black people are using it," why go against that narrative when you want to get that publication in The New York Times or wherever? It encourages people to play right into it.

Dopamine makes up less than one percent of the brain's neurotransmitters. It's a small portion. Dopamine is released when people are happy, angry, stressed. So it's really hard to call this specific neurotransmitter "the pleasure neurotransmitter."

People rarely die from heroin alone, it's the combination that's deadly. Maybe we should blast that out as a public health education message. That way at least we're keeping people safe.

Take crack cocaine. Particularly in the early days of the policy, ninety percent of the people being arrested were black, even though they didn't use the drug at higher rates and even though their numbers in the general population are so low. How could that be? The thing is, you place all your resources in communities of color. And if you do that, you're going to arrest black people.