Looking at the data and at my drug use and evaluating it carefully just let me see that I wasn't special, but my drug use challenged what I thought about cocaine. Because I would accept when I would say, "What happened to that person?" and someone would say, "They started using cocaine...they went downhill..." I would just accept that, even though I had a different experience and all these other people had a different experience. But I would throw that out because I thought my experience was an aberration.

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.

If we want to think about racism and how it might play out in drug policy, we have to think about the trial of George Zimmerman. We think about the prosecution, when they said "race is not a factor." It's so dishonest.

We should decriminalize all drugs. The assumptions on which our drug policies are based are flawed.

We need to continuously put pressure on politicians to do more, because they are happy just to do nothing—it’s easier to do nothing.

I think about my cocaine use. I liked it. I thought it was a great drug. But I knew that if I was doing that almost exclusively, I wouldn't be able to continue to also have significant others and a wide range of other things. And I wasn't special. A number of people, including the people I was doing cocaine with, also behaved the same way.

I have three boys. And I wanted to make sure it connected with them and then those guys who grew up like me, in environments like me.And then I knew something about science that your New York Times reader would be interested in. So I was thinking about it in multiple ways: I'll connect with the people who grew up like me first, and then the New York Times reader will be interested in the science because it's so good and they want to be "in the know."