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

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

Writing in a nuanced way, getting at all the details in a way that remains interesting for the reader, is very difficult.

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 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.

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.