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

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.

Much of the early work focused on dopamine and we were really looking for rewarding sorts of effects and sure enough, we only found that. But you can destroy the main dopamine-producing structures of the brain and you can still get an animal to self-administer drugs like cocaine.

Crack in the early 1980s or mid 1980s I'm sorry is that one of the worst myth is that one hit and you're addicted for life. We saw that in 1980s and we're seeing it again with methamphetamine today, one hit and you're addicted and it simply not true, addiction requires work not the people should go out and experiment or do these themselves but the fact is that's a myth and the concern is that, it's dangerous because when people perpetuates that myths and then when young people are people actually try methamphetamine or crack cocaine and find that, that doesn't happen to them.

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.

The way we're currently educating people about heroin is to say that heroin is so awful. Heroin is not so much the problem. It's when you combine it. It's hard to die from heroin alone.

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.