There is a safe, nontoxic drug called naloxone that can instantly reverse opioid overdose and prevent most of these deaths. But the drug war interferes with saving overdose victims in two ways: first, because witnesses to overdose fear prosecution, they often don't call for help until it's too late. Second, because the drug war supports the belief that making naloxone available over-the-counter or with opioid prescriptions would encourage drug use, the antidote is available only through harm reduction programs like needle exchanges or in some state programs aimed at drug users.

Love is great and it does help a lot of people, but a lot of people do have things like depression or schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or other disorders, all of which will need to be addressed in order for people to stay in long-term recovery.

Punishment by definition isn't going to help. So what you need to do is to help people to change and recover is to help them find different areas of passion and help them find better ways of coping. Because about 50 percent of people with addiction have a preexisting mental illness, about two-thirds have had some type of severe trauma during childhood, and they are not using to the point where they're risking their lives because it's fun. They're doing something to help them cope.

In a criminal justice setting, it's very hard to create a therapeutic environment where people do feel safe, but the real important thing to do is to do your best to do that.

We have a system that was devised by racists to create racist ends.

Science could never get you to make alcohol and tobacco legal and marijuana illegal. Only racism can do that.

Do we really want to base our 21st-century policy on what the colonialist preferred at a certain time in history, not at all based on health or what the preferences of different cultures might be? That's just ridiculous.