I think our drug laws need to be made scientifically, as best as possible, recognizing that values will always be part of that.

If you're worried about a kid and drug use, the safest, best thing to do is individual counseling or family therapy, none of which will expose kids to more deviant or problematic peers and both of which are proven to be effective and at the very least, they won't hurt.

Because of the war on drugs, pain patients are treated with skepticism and pain doctors live in fear of being prosecuted for overprescribing. The end result is that addicts still get their opioids without much trouble, while genuine patients often can't find treatment. Those who do must typically be tracked in a database and must schedule frequent, expensive doctor visits for surveillance like urine testing.

We should not be putting kids in cages and hoping that is going to fix their psychological problems of any type.

Incarceration is as useful for addiction as it is for diabetes - i.e., not useful and potentially harmful, particularly for kids.

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.

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