 Nobody has any idea how pivotal a man named George Soros has been to the growth of this movement. The fact of the matter is that so much of what has made this possible, even this event possible and this movement possible, was the money that has flowed from him through DPA in other ways that's been pivotal. But you know, before there was George Soros, there was a man who made a lot of money very fast in his 30s, a sort of liberal libertarian guy named Richard Dennis and he was the one who provided the money that created the startup for the Drug Policy Foundation in the late 80s and early 90s before handing off the baton to George Soros. He's the one who provided that key money to get things going and so the biggest award we named after Richard Dennis and who I'm grateful has actually provided a little money this time to help make this event possible. Now, I should tell you, we've long had a rule about these awards at the Drug Policy Alliance, which we have never broken until just now. The rule was that nobody serving on the board of the Drug Policy Alliance could receive one of these awards. They just have to wait until they retired or step down or what have you and there's many people on the board of the Drug Policy Alliance who certainly merit receiving these awards. And so as we were considering who should get the biggest award that Drug Policy Alliance gives and we're thinking about various very worthy people, my colleagues involved in figuring all this out launched a revolt. It's got to be Ira Glasser, they said. I said, we can't do that. We can't do that because we have a rule. They said, we'll figure out a way to change that rule. So I spoke to some of the members of our executive committee and we launched a coup against the chairman of our board, Ira Glasser, to require that Ira Glasser receive the Richard Dennis award tonight. We are not providing any precedent here. This is a one off one time thing. But this is really personal and special for me because I get to give the award to a man who has fought for civil liberties, to a man who has fought for civil liberties and civil rights and justice in this country for over 50 years. To a man who started working at the New York Civil Liberties Union that assumed the helm of that organization in the 1970s, then became the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union for 23 years from 1978 to 2001. He took that organization, which had been doing great work for many decades and turned it into a powerhouse in American politics. And even the last 10 years he was doing that, he started coming to Drug Policy Foundation meetings being here every year, joining the board of the Drug Policy Foundation almost 25 years ago, becoming its chair in the late 1990s, even while running the ACLU. And then when the time came in 2000 for me to spin the Linda Smith Center out of the Soros Foundation and when the Drug Policy Foundation had fallen on some hard times and the time came to merge those two organizations into the Drug Policy Alliance, Ira and I got together and said, let's do this. Let's do this. I told Ira, I can't do this without you. If we're going to build something here, we need a partnership. We need a partnership. So what Ira has accomplished, not just out front running the American Civil Liberties Union, not just out front as chairman of the board of this organization really since its inception, what he has accomplished behind the scenes in terms of being my partner and a partner to my colleagues in building Drug Policy Alliance and building this movement and providing the steady hand in mentoring me and being my dear friend and my brother and being an extraordinary leader willing to get out front and also get behind me in this organization and to embrace DPA as his true love of the past 15 years. I cannot imagine anybody more worthy of this award nor anybody I would get greater pleasure in presenting this award to. So these are going to be the last words you're going to hear from me at this conference. I'm going to invite Ira Glasser up here to receive this award. I'm going to ask Crystal to follow him by bringing us into song to close this and then you're not going to hear from me. That's going to be the end of the night. So Ira, please come on up. I'm wearing a suit. About eight of you have come up to me with astonishment as if I was someone in disguise and said, you're wearing a suit. Well, if you like it, take a good look because you won't soon see it again. This is a real thrill. It really is. And not just to get an award like this from people you love and respect and with whom you've been in the foxhole for decades. It's a thrill to get it at this conference at this time in this place with this audience. When I first started coming as the ACLU Executive Director to these conferences in 1989, having already sort of been in this struggle and feeling very alone in it for 20 years, I was astonished and encouraged by finding 300 people who were at the conference. That was the biggest group of organized opponents to the drug war that I had ever seen in 20 years of fighting it at the ACLU. And I thought that was a lot of people. And now there were 1500 people here this conference. And the 300 people were the whole iceberg. That was the whole organized opposition. The 1500 people are the tip of the iceberg. And the nature of the iceberg has thrillingly changed too. Icebergs are all white. Back in the day, there was not a single person of color among those 300 people at that conference. And I remember the first time I got up to take note of that, since the people who were being targeted by this war and who were its primary victims in whose behalf we said we were fighting this war or thought we were weren't in the room. So what did we know? It was mostly about our own personal rights. There were a lot of stoners among those 300. Well, good for them. We were for them. That was the issue. That was the issue of personal freedom and liberty. But they weren't the only ones. They weren't even most of the ones. And it was a long haul, not only to build the constituency at these conferences from 300 to 1500, but more importantly and more significantly to change its composition to what you see today. That was not easy. And that is thrilling to me. So we come together at really a high time in the movement. No pun intended. But this is a moment of great progress. It is a moment when the horizon of justice seems closer than it's ever seen before. But I come with a warning from having come through a bunch of other social justice movements in my other life. And that is, is that be encouraged. Be optimistic. There is reason to be encouraged. There is reason to be optimistic. We are ahead and we are gaining ground and we are beginning to win. But resist premature celebration. Celebration, as my Mets found out, when you're ahead in the eighth inning, doesn't work because there's a ninth inning. Wait until the game is over. Celebration causes you to relax. And there are opponents out there who are smart, better resourced, more of them, more powerful and just as relentless as we are. Do not relax. Don't celebrate yet. And beware of a few other things as we move forward into this, into this, what seems, what feels like a home stretch. But it isn't yet. Beware of partial victories. In the, in 1973, in 1973, Roe v. Wade declared all criminal abortion laws unconstitutional and out. We celebrated. All of us who had been in that fight for years and for years thought it was pretty much over, except for a little mop up. I remember going for my offices at the Civil Liberties Union over to the New York Planned Parenthood offices where they were having a white wine and cheese party. And everybody was exultant. And while we were celebrating, and while we were sleeping, and while we were congratulating ourselves for our victory, the other side almost rolled it all the way back. And today, there are more women still who don't have the reality of reproductive rights that we thought we had all along. And a lot of us did have it. My daughter had it. My aunts had it. If you were white, middle class and lived in certain places, you had the right to reproductive freedom. But if you were rural, and you were of color, and you were young, and you were poor, you didn't have it, you still don't have it. And there are still people like Lynn Paltrow spending her whole life trying to get what we thought we had back then. So be careful of partial victories. And be careful not to leave people behind. Because when white middle class women got the right, they weren't marching to Washington with 500,000 of them to win the right for some poor woman in a remote area of Texas after all of the clinics had been closed. You need to maintain the constituency for everyone. And as those t-shirts and sweatshirts that you've been seeing all over the conference has said, it's all of us or none of us. And if freedom and liberty are truly indivisible, and what that means in fact is, if all of us aren't free, then none of us are free. So beware of partial victories, and beware of leaving vulnerable constituencies and targets and victims behind. I also want to warn you and us to remain alert to new forms and new systems of subjugation. Remember, everybody thought after slavery when the civil rights amendments were passed in the Constitution, the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments, that liberty and freedom and equality were now guaranteed by law, and slavery and subjugation was over. It was for about 10 minutes. And then the black codes came in. And then Jim Crow laws came in. And then the Supreme Court backed off. We don't have a Supreme Court that's backing off because it isn't there yet. And then Congress backed off. And then racial subjugation existed in the South and in much of the North for another hundred years in a slightly different form, but no less oppressive and no less destructive. And when the civil rights movement achieved in the mid and late 60s, civil rights statutes that ended Jim Crow, again we thought we had finally achieved a measure of justice and we had ended something. And almost immediately following upon those victories came the declaration of the war on drugs. And it was targeted intentionally and from the start against people of color. And while we congratulated ourselves on having won the right to vote for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the right to vote was systematically stripped away again by felony disenfranchisement laws and felony convictions for nonviolent drug offenses, not in the hundreds of thousands, but in the millions. And I'll tell you if Martin Luther King Jr. was looking down and could see about the right to vote, he would know what we know too. That many of those who died for the right to vote in the middle 60s have to say we don't have it yet. That the war on drugs became another way of subjugating people on the basis of the color of their skin and another way of separating them out from the rest of society. Slavery was a prison, Jim Crow was a prison, and our prisons are prisons too. So beware as we unravel this war on drugs of new forms and new systems for subjugation arising out of the rubble. Because the war on drugs may end the same way that Jim Crow ended, but the impulse for subjugation based on skin color will not end, has not ended, is alive and too well in the society, and it can and probably will emerge again if we are not careful and alert to it. So do not get seduced by our victories into thinking that what drove those repressive systems is not still lurking out there. Now, we often hear about more and more these days about the moral arc of justice and the moral arc bends toward justice and it is intoned and said and repeated as if it's kind of automatic, you know, like you drop an apple and it falls to ground and the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. Right. All you have to do is wait around and it'll bend. Well, the moral arc of the universe may bend toward justice, but it sure as hell doesn't bend by itself. It never has been by itself. It never will bend by itself. You have to bend it. I have to bend it. We have to bend it. And you have to keep bending it because it has this crazy resilience. If you let up, it unbends itself, it backs up and there are other people out there bending it back all the time. So you have to keep bending it. You have to step on it. You have to lean on it and you need more and more people coming into the movement to get on pile on the pile and bend it and bend it or otherwise it will not bend toward justice. Another another cliche about this movement and all movements is that it's not a sprint. It's a marathon. Okay, we all know that. But you know, it isn't just a marathon. A marathon like, you know, the New York City marathon 26 miles. It has a beginning. It has an end. And it's over. Our marathon is not just a marathon. It's a marathon relay race. And it doesn't have an end. I got on the track a long time ago. I'm carrying this baton and I'm running and I'm running and for a while I think I'm running alone with two or three other people and then there's a few hundred people. But there's certain people not there. And then there's 500 people and then there's a thousand people and then there's 1500 people. And now everybody does seem to be there. And now we're running hard. And now we begin to see that we're making progress. But do not think that the race has an end for you. Because justice is not attained ever by the brevity of our own lives. Our role is to get on the track, take that baton, link arms with others, run it as hard and as fast and as long and as smart and as strategic and as relentlessly as you can. But the race will not end by the time you need to get off. By the time you're forced to get off. So if there are not other people on it running with you ready to take the baton, the race cannot be won. So one of the things that is thrilling about this conference are how many young people there are. Because I'm pretty energetic for an old guy. I can still run pretty fast if I need to for a little bit of time. But I'm basically on the sidelines off the track jogging along with you all, you know, and if you don't have a lot of young people coming on the track to run that race, that race cannot be won. So one of the thrilling things and one of the things we have to keep on doing is bringing new people on. I'm happy to see all folks that I see every couple of years here that I first began to see in this fight 25 years ago. I love seeing them again. But we are relics. We're not going to run this race that much longer. And even people I used to think were babies like Ethan, he's getting up there too. You know, when I when I first started fighting this thing, I had four children and the oldest one was about five or six. And now, and when I retired from the ACLU, I had two grandchildren. One of them was one of them is four. The four year old is now 20 and a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh, and now writes me text messages asking me questions about politics and social justice and and and maybe drug policy. But I have 10 grandchildren now. So here's here's one of the lessons you have to outvote the sons of bitches, you know, and those young people that are inclined have to come on have to be encouraged to come on have to be nurtured and given positions of leadership and given their heads and allowed to make their mistakes, but they have to be on the track. Or we will not get where we're going. How many of you have ever heard of a man named Vince Lombardi? Good. That's more than you usually find in a kind of a liberal audience. Vince Lombardi was a legendary football coach. I know, I know that Deborah Small paid homage to my my obsession with baseball the other day, when she used the baseball analogy. But Vince Lombardi was the most famous football coach of his time. And he he he was the most successful football coach of his time. And when he retired, his peers and his colleagues gave him a big retirement send off dinner. And person after person got up and talked about how many more games he had won than he lost. And when I was all finished, he got up. And he leaned out on the lectern. And he said, Well, you know, actually, I never lost a football game. Once in a while, time ran out. And I always loved that story, because I thought when I heard it, that in our game, time never runs out. We have a team that keeps on going and keeps getting regenerated. And new folks keep coming in. And we just keep playing. And when we're on that track, we just keep running. And if we stumble, we get up and we keep running. And if we get knocked back, we get up and we call another play. And we keep running. And it has been for me much more than any specific award could ever be. It has been for me such an unbelievable honor. And as Neil said, a blessing, a blessing to run with you for as long as I have and to keep running with you. And so my message is keep running. Don't be frustrated if you don't get there, because you probably won't get there. But you'll get closer. The horizon of justice is ever closer. And we are advancing on it every day. And if you don't get there yourself, hand the baton to someone who will keep running. And if you stumble, get up and keep running. And if you fall off and some other people fall off, get back and keep running. Here's my shirt. You know, I'm, I'm so manipulative. I knew if I said this, I would finally get one of these shirts. And you'll see it. You'll see it before you see a suit again, too. Thank you. Thank you. So, so keep on running, no matter what. Don't worry too much about getting there or here. As I said, some of us will fall off the track. There'll be others to get on. Some of us will stumble and fall down or get knocked back by our opponents. We'll get up and keep on running. Keep on running. Keep on keeping on because that's the way the race is won. Thank you.