 Our next speaker is someone I have an incredible honor to introduce, it's very humbling. She was my boss when I worked at the Drug Policy Alliance for the first time and so I was able to sit at her feet for three years and be amazed by her daily, the way that I'm sure all of you who joined us at the Black Lives Matter Town Hall or last night with her brilliance, Ms. Deborah Peterson-Small is, thank you. So Deborah Peterson-Small is founder and executive director of Break the Chains, a public policy research and advocacy organization committed to addressing the disproportionate impact of punitive drug policies on poor communities of color. It was founded in the belief that community activism and advocacy is an essential component of progressive policy and works to engage families and community leaders in promoting alternatives to the failed war on drugs by adopting public health approaches to substance abuse and drug related crime. Please join me in welcoming the amazing Deborah Peterson-Small. Good morning everyone. Can't tell you how happy I am to be here. I wanna start actually by acknowledging the shoulders that I'm standing on because we did start with the memoriam and there were three people there who were really important to me being here today. The first one was Dr. Benny Prym. He was one of the first people that I met when I came into this community and throughout the entire time of my relationship with him, he was more than just an advisor. He was like the father that I didn't have. I could always go to him and talk to him about anything. And I really think it's important for people to get to know who he was and what it was that he contributed because so many of us are doing work that was based on the things that he started back in the 1960s. The second person is Eddie Ellis who literally took me to prison. I would not be here doing this work if it was not for him. He identified very early on when I was working for the Civil Liberties Union and going up to Albany that all he needed to do was to bring me to the place where the horrors were happening and then allow the rest to take care of itself. And I love Eddie and I miss him so much. And then finally, someone who wasn't included in that because he died almost a decade ago, but Keith Kyler, one of the founders of Housing Works was also really, really instrumental in my development as an advocate, as a policy person, and as a fighter because Keith lived his life fully as the person he wanted to be a drug user. He never shied away from that. He never denied that. He never felt ashamed of that. And to me, it's really important if this movement is really a movement about elevating people who use drugs that we have at the forefront, people who actually use drugs and are not ashamed to say it. I want to pick up where Ethan left off yesterday in talking about the importance of knowing our history because for me, I came to this movement because of my belief and commitment to social justice and I feel like I'm always learning more and more and more about how all these things tie together. So I want you all to go with me on a little history journey. I'm gonna go even further back than Damon went. I'm gonna go back 400 years because I think it's important for us to recognize that the Western civilization of which most of us are a part was built and funded on the promotion of addiction for profit. I want to repeat that. The Western civilization that we are part of, the Anglo-American enterprise of which the US was the most successful process, project was built and financed by promoting addiction for profit to sugar, tobacco, alcohol. The slave trade was developed in order to support the promotion of addiction for profit. Racism was invented to justify the slave trade which was developed to promote addiction for profit. And here we are 400 years later after having built an empire on the backs of people that we got addicted to things so we could make money from them. Now we have a new system of punishing people for the addictions we developed so that we can profit from the punishment. So I wanna assert that the greatest addictions that Americans have is not to drugs. Our three biggest addictions are to denial, to punishment, and to the American dream. I'm gonna take a minute on that one because we talked about that a little bit yesterday and I just want people to think about this because we don't actually have critical conversations about the words that we use and what they mean. What is it to be a country that defines itself in terms of a dream? Which is by definition not real. Like really, our whole identity is built up in pursuing something that actually doesn't exist. And if we were real about our history, we would acknowledge that that period of goldenness, wonderful America, only lasted for 30 years. 30 years out of an almost 300 year period but we've defined our whole identity inside of this 30 year period when everybody seemed to be doing good because the rest of the world was doing bad. That's not sustainable. So one of the messages I have for you all is like it's time for us to wake up and live in reality, not in the dream. And in the reality of our system that we're in now, one of the biggest problems that we have is our addiction to consumerism and to believing that we are what we consume. You know, I say that by definition, drug prohibition cannot exist compatible with human rights. It's not possible to have a system based on prohibition that's compatible with human rights because by practice it's a policy that requires that you punish people who are involved with drugs. We say that it's a war on drugs but it's not a war on drugs, it's a war on people. You can't war on the plants, they keep growing no matter what we do. So what really this is, is a war on people. And it's not a war on people who are doing things that we all agree are problematic. It's a war on people that we don't like who are doing things that are only problematic because they're doing them, all right? I mean, one of the biggest frustrations that I continue to have as a drug policy reform advocate is the willingness of so many people to feel it's okay to punish those other people for things that they're doing. And that, you know, reform is punishment light. But we never get to the point of like actually not talking about punishment. I say that as a society and culture, our relationship with drugs is rooted in hypocrisy. Greed, human exploitation, we care more about our ability to be able to punish people than we care about actually preserving their health than we do about protecting them. So I wanna just go over just a few examples of real examples of the ways in which drug policies operate in ways that are dehumanizing. The first one I wanna speak to, cause I'm a female, is the way in which our policies are directed against women. One of the justifications for adopting these treaties in the first place was that they were gonna protect women and children. And yet what we have seen now in the U.S. and in other countries is the stigmatization of women and particularly of pregnant and parenting women and the criminalization of their outcomes based on whether or not they use drugs. So in the 80s, it was crack babies in the 2000s, it's oxytocs. We never talk about poverty as a problem for people's birth outcomes. We never talk about all the legal drugs that people get to use, but we're more than willing to lock up women for that. Second, dehumanizing drug conspiracy laws, guilt by association. That's why Kemba got sentenced to all that time. They acknowledged that she didn't use drugs, they acknowledged that she didn't sell drugs, but she was guilty because of her association. What kind of dehumanization is that? And one of the consequences of that is that we use those conspiracy laws to force people to tell lies on each other in order to avoid having the majority of their life be spent behind bars. That is dehumanizing. Don't clap, because I only got three minutes. Last two points, three strikes laws. For me, this is something I really want us to think about, because we not only apply that in sentencing, we apply that in treatment, we apply that in schools, and we never ask ourselves, where the hell the strikes come from? It's a baseball metaphor. Why do you have strikes in baseball? Because there is no clock. I'm serious, don't laugh. There's no clock in baseball, so the purpose of balls and strikes is to add some level of boundary and finality to an otherwise untimed game, but people are not like baseball. We're more like football and basketball, because our clock starts running from the moment that we're born. We are finite people. So we need to think about what it means to apply a sports metaphor that's designed in that context to people, to people's lives, to say three strikes, you're out. What the hell does that mean? And we actually don't even critically examine how we came up with that, how we're applying it, and what it actually means. Now I know I'm running out of time, so I'm gonna go to my last two points real quick, which is what is drug policy reform? This is again a point where history has to teach us something. In the same way that ending legal slavery did not equate with black freedom, ending mass incarceration is not the same as actually removing all the shackles, et cetera, that drug policies have placed on people of color. Okay, we need to actually think about what is the role that the drug war has played? It has been the space to continue to allow the economic, political, and social oppression and exploitation of people in general, but black and brown people in particular. So if our reform is not changing that power relationship, if all we're doing is taking off people's physical chains and putting them in the economic chains of having to pay for the privilege of not going to prison so that somebody else gets to profit, that's not real reform. And for all of you pot-pot entrepreneurs out there, my question to you is are you going to be a parasite or a social engineer? Are you gonna use your money to keep sucking the blood out of our community, or are you actually gonna be part of the solution of applying reparations? And yes, I said that word, because God damn it, I am done with the idea of people having policies that screw over people for decades and then one day they say, oh wow, we've come to lighten my bad and all of a sudden it's all good and we're still left with the scars. We're still left with the hurt. We're still left with all of the damage that has been done. You guys owe us and I'm here to collect.