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.

I've had investigations of my lab because people didn't like what I had to say. And when you have investigations and you're doing research, you're shut down for a while. You have to start all over again. So that's one area where I paid a high price.

Your decision to place your law enforcement resources in these communities is racism, but nobody has called people out on this. The law itself is not racist. But people's decision about where we're going to place our efforts, who we're going to prosecute, who we're not going to prosecute, is racism. And nobody's calling them on it.

Our ability to study the brain has been limited because of our tools and our tools have only allowed us to look at one neurotransmitter and we haven't looked so much into co-localization and co-release of transmitters. Our thinking is hampered by our tools.

The policy that received more attention particularly in the past decade and a half or so has been the US cocaine policy, the differential treatment of crack versus powder cocaine and question is how my research impacted my view on policy. Clearly that policy is not based on the weight of the scientific evidence. That is when the policy was implemented, the concern about crack cocaine was so great that something had to be done and congress acted in the only way they knew how, they passed policy and that's what a responsible society should do.

One of the things that has happened is that our drug laws have been institutionalized now. If you want to say that somebody's a bad person in a movie or in a television show or something about that, you say they sell drugs or they use 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.