I don't think there's a single child who's ever benefitted from being arrested for marijuana or for underage drinking; this does not solve the problem. It makes worse problems because a) it puts them into the system, and b) it gives them a potential criminal record to have to deal with and it can have consequences for school.

Addiction is when you fall in love with a drug instead of a child or a lover and the learning that takes part in that part of the brain is designed by evolution to get us to persist despite negative consequences to do what we need to do - because I don't know anybody who could survive a relationship or parenting if not for the ability to persist despite negative consequences. The problem is when that gets misdirected to a drug and then you can find yourself in some very negative and potentially deadly situations.

I know that sounds really extreme, but if you just look at the history, you will find Harry Anslinger [first U.S. commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics] going on about satanic swing and how reefer will make black people think they're as good as white people - which to him, obviously, was a very horrible outcome. This is the basis of our drug laws.

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.

I don't have kids, but I've often noticed when people first become parents they seem to completely forget their own adolescence and they start to, as their kids become teenagers, try to do the things that didn't stop them themselves. And I jokingly frame this as: Your brain gets wiped of those memories when you become a parent.

When President Nixon declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, about 110 people per 100,000 in the population were incarcerated. Today, we have 2-3 million prisoners: 743 people per 100,000 in the population. The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners. As Senator Jim Webb once put it, Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different and vastly counterproductive.