Take crack cocaine. Particularly in the early days of the policy, ninety percent of the people being arrested were black, even though they didn't use the drug at higher rates and even though their numbers in the general population are so low. How could that be? The thing is, you place all your resources in communities of color. And if you do that, you're going to arrest black people.

Dopamine makes up less than one percent of the brain's neurotransmitters. It's a small portion. Dopamine is released when people are happy, angry, stressed. So it's really hard to call this specific neurotransmitter "the pleasure neurotransmitter."

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

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.

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.

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.

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