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.

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.

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.

You have rappers saying "stay off drugs, go to school" - empty verbal behavior. I think all of this became institutionalized in the early '90s. And it's become more and more solidified, more and more entrenched.

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.

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.

High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society.