A lot of the stuff that we say about drugs is just wrong.

There's traditionally been two different ways of seeing addiction. Either it's a sin and you're a horrible bad person and you are just choosing to be hedonist or it's a chronic progressive disease. And while I certainly believe addiction is a medical problem that should be dealt with by the health system, the way we've conceptualized addiction as a disease is not actually accurate, and it has unfortunately become stigmatizing and it's also created a lot of hopelessness in a lot of people.

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.

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.

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 order for people to recover, we can't just say 'love is all we need.'

Because addiction is a developmental problem, the developmental stage is important, things like employment are important, things like having a sense of purpose, meaning and hope are important, and this is why there's been so many spiritual cures for addiction, because those things often give people a sense of meaning and purpose.