 Thank you, thank you very much, thank you very much. Okay, I think they told me I got about, was it 90 minutes, two hours? This is such a blast, I am having such a good time. I really am, I feel like, I got no responsibilities, I got no plans, you all look beautiful, you can all throw shit, I don't care, this is beautiful, and Maria, Maria thank you for taking this baby off my hands, cause I got faith you were gonna do the right stuff with it, the right stuff. So, I mean, this is, you gotta give me the moment, it's like I gotta do a little walking down memory lane right here. I gotta do it, and I realize, and by the way, cause I'm gonna mention a lot of people and I'm inevitably gonna forget some, so please forgive me, forgive me if I do that because I just gotta say, let me just start by saying, when I got involved in this over 30 years ago, first started speaking out as a young professor, I did not envision creating an organization, I couldn't imagine creating an organization, I could not imagine managing other people, I couldn't even manage myself. I mean, it was inconceivable to me. And yet, with all the craziness and the burden and the service, service is a Yiddish word which means trouble, headaches, of running an organization and dealing with real human beings and all their stuff, the fact of the matter is one of the greatest sources of joy has been the people that I've worked with, within Drug Policy Alliance, Linda Smith Center before that, and in this broader movement, both in this country and around the world. And I just gotta shout out some of them and remember as many of the people, because remember, this goes back not just the 17 years of DPA, it goes back to 23 years, back to 94, and they're starting at Linda Smith Center. I gotta start off by just saying the people, I mean, let me start with New Jersey and Roseanne Scottie. I mean, what you know is when Roseanne says, I said, Roseanne, look, we need you to legalize needle exchange, got it Ethan? We need you to end those drug free school, got it Ethan, it's gonna happen. We need you to pass the best naloxo, got it Ethan, it's gonna happen. We need you to do medical, got it, got it. You know, with Roseanne, you don't know when it's gonna get done, but it is gonna get done. And that powerhouse of a woman with her indefiniteable, you know, deputy Megan Glazer had made stuff happen and made stuff happen in New Jersey, has landed on the front page of the papers and transformed what was the worst state in America when it came to the war on drugs. No state had a higher rate of incarcerating people for drug offenses. No state had more people dying of HIV, women and babies, and Roseanne has transformed that. I look at, I look at, you're not gonna have time to applaud for all of this. New Mexico, you know, three women, Catherine Huffman, Rina Shepansky, and Emily Calton back in the AMAZE teams they assembled. Catherine Huffman who moved there, that stayed back in 2000, everything set foot there, worked without Libertarian Republican governor, Gary Johnson, who had stepped out courageously to challenge the drug war, and the Democrats in the legislature, neither of whom wanted to do anything one another, and they, she put that stuff together. I think Catherine was the first DPA colleague who was ever hospitalized for exhaustion, but not the last. Rina Shepansky who is now the chief of staff to the New Mexico Speaker, and just made stuff happen working with Bill Richardson, Emily Calton back who had a deal with this atrocious governor, Martinez, coming in and figured out a way to build left-right coalitions like nobody had ever done in America on this cause, absolutely extraordinary. I look in Los Angeles, when we opened it up with Alberto Mendoza, and then we had Stephen Gutwillig, who became my deputy and just made things happen, Margaret Dooley-Samueli, who's here today, and just does amazing work. You know, Lynn Lyman, who put together, I mean, just the role she played, not just on the marijuana thing, but on everything else, Armando Goudinho, who actually broke through on the issues of cremigration and got Latino activists to embrace marijuana reform, because we had proved our merits on the cremigration stuff, making that stuff happen. San Francisco, hey, Marsha Rosenbaum, you know, hitting it out of the park on safety first, turning this model city Laura Thomas, I know you're gonna get that safe injection facility going, will you be first, we will see. You know, hey, Glenn Backes, Glenn been with me everywhere, from the international stuff to the US stuff, Sacramento, making it happen. Hey, Art Colorado, I am so proud of you, becoming a national figure on this stuff, the stuff you're making happen there, and in DC, beginning with Bill McCall, and then Bill Piper, our longtime director there, Jasmine Tyler, and Naomi Long, Michael Collins and Grant Smith, and Malake, who landed up leading the first marijuana decrim legalization effort in which racial justice was front and center and pivotal to the success of that campaign, providing a model for how we do this in other places. New York, my home, headquarters. Derek Hodel, I love you and I thank you. Both for the five years you did with me back then and for the work you did as DPA's interim director when I decided to step down, you have done beautiful, incredible work and I am so profoundly grateful. And then for the five people who headed up our New York efforts and became national leaders, Vince Marone, Deborah Small, Michael Blaine, may he rest in peace, Gabriel Seah, and now Cassandra Federique. I mean, you're talking about dynamos coming out of New York and becoming national leaders in a way that have helped transform drug policy in this country. Hey, Jag, Gulford on the psychedelics and Hannah, our dynamo on the international front, right? The people who helped me raise the money, Clovis and Ellen, Gloka and Jude, yeah, man, you did it. Our communication director, Deedee and Sharda, if you don't know them, you gotta know them. And my brother, Tony Newman, the media maestro, the media maestro, the media maestro. Stephanie, who organized these conferences and then became our person, working on the dancing and keeping people safe when they want to party, making the stuff happen in ways that are pivotal. Tommy and Tony, working at the media department, Tommy McDonald, Tony Papa, you guys are heroes to me as well. What a trio we've had in that team. Asha, Asha, Asha Washington, you spread your wings and fly and make stuff happen at MC and build the best grants program in America, a grants program that cares about the people that talks about not as grantees, but as partners that infuses with love and passion and direction and has made incredible, incredible things happen. I love you so much, I admire you so much. And let me just say, because nobody, nobody except those who work in DPA more or less who are gonna know about these two people, but they are DPA's internal secret weapons. Ryan Chavez and Lena McGoya, oh yeah, baby. DPA, give them a shout out for Ryan and Lena who never gets a public recognition, but who made the machinery work inside in a way that never gets applause, never gets a claim, but this machine never would have worked without the work they do. Now, I know I've left some out and I do apologize because there's been hundreds of people who have come through and worked and made the stuff happen or going out and do an incredible work. Then I have to turn to other people. There's four people, I would say, who have been absolutely central to my life, my success, and the success of this organization. And the first one, who some of you know, is my daughter Lila. Lila's not here tonight, but when you're an activist and you're going 24-7, what did you call it, Harry, 36-9, you know, and you're going non-stop, non-stop, non-stop, but my love for my daughter and my commitment to being a good father was the thing that kept me sane. It was as somebody who had grown up as a traditional Jew, keeping the Sabbath and rejected that, who obliged me to once again relearn the meaning of the Sabbath and the importance of the Sabbath and putting things aside in order to rejuice and to love and to get to your heart so that you come back out the next day fighting and making things happen. And when I can say to all of you, whether you have religion, no religion, I don't care what date is, what it is, the notion of somehow putting away that time, Kenny Glasgow, when you put down that phone and you take that 24 hours or whatever it is once a week and disconnect and it feels like you're stealing time away from the movement. But you know, it's when the new ideas come, it's how you recharge, it's how you have the ability to pace yourself as I was said in this opening thing, this is a marathon we are in and that's one of the ways you just gotta do that. It's my tip to all of you as activists. Secondly, my partner in this for so long, my partner in work, my partner in play, my partner in romance, Marcia Rosenbaum. You know, I mean Marcia, I have so much admired the kind of leadership role you've played in terms of the safety first and addressing the issue of kids and constantly finding the new energy to get out there, to bring the California PTA on board and others on board and we think it's flagging and all of a sudden it's flying again. Your work in San Francisco and educating that young city councilman who became the mayor, who became the lieutenant governor, who will likely be the next governor of California Gavin Newsom, your role as essentially the first lady of this organization movement. I love you so much. I am so grateful you have kept me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Third, he ain't here, but George Soros, I mean, if I think about who are my heroes, it's a weird group. It's people you all think about. It's people like Martin Luther King. It's people like Nelson Mandela, people who had the vision and did the impossible in the ways that I was talking about. You know, I don't know if Malcolm X was my hero, but I will say that when I saw that movie about him back in Christmas 94, just as I was starting this thing up, it was one of the most inspirational things I ever saw in my life. Vaklav Havel, the hero of the Czechoslovakian Czech Republic. But there's two other people. One of them I'll mention shortly. But the one I'm thinking about now, George Soros, he is truly a hero to me. His vision, his commitment in the world at large, his being the leading funder of human rights and fighting against xenophobia and closed-mindedness and everything all around the world. The leading who took virtually all his money and said, I'm gonna pour it into advancing this cause around the world who has kept his moral center. And when I think back just over 25 years ago to that phone call I got from George Soros invited me to lunch and the conversation we had or open society was breaking out and the former Soviet Union had fallen and everybody was thinking open society. And he's asking himself, was it America the model of the open society? And he asked, what is the one thing in America that is most antithetical to open society ideals? And the first thing that hit him between the eyes was the war on drugs. It made no sense. It was the leading exemplar of socialist dictatorship and fascistic dictatorship thinking in American open societies and we sat for two hours and we argued and we shook hands and things started to happen. And the fact, nobody thought he would stick with this. Nobody thought that this would become one of his top three passions in all of his global advocacy. And we argued and we fought and people came after me and tried to cut my legs off repeatedly inside his foundation outside and George stood by me and he stood by this cause. And very, very recently at the age of 87 he just renewed his commitment to this. I got to tell you, this movement, I fear to think, I fear to think what it would be without George and without his vision and the moral clarity and the courage and the damn everybody, he was gonna do what was right. And last, I could have done this without you. I could not have done this without you. I remember, you know, we met back when, you know, that Right Wing Institute, Manhattan Institute June 88, right, 29 years ago. And you are a role model, you are my big brother, you are my mentor, you have been my partner. I could not do this stuff, but for you, I don't know how I could possibly have done it, how I could have learned to run an organization to have. I got to see when people asked me, well, Ethan, I just become an ED, what do you need to, what's the key thing? I said, find yourself an hour glass and raise your board chair. Find your somebody who can be your board chair, who you are such a close and trusting relationship with that no matter what shit hits the fan, no matter how much you fuck up, you can put it all on the table in front of him and know he's gonna help you figure it out. To have a board chair when my staff was pissed at me and worried about me and wanted a vent that they had permission to call my board chair without me knowing and vent at him about me and I would use the judgment about what to do with that information. It was the two of us guiding this thing and balancing this thing from the board meetings to the running and I have to tell you, when Ira and I had the first conversation and now you're gonna hear some inside stuff, when we had that first conversation in the summer of 2015 when I was beginning to think about making this move and at first he was going, nah, nah, no, maybe just a sabbatical, dah, dah, dah. And then as the conversation got more and we got to the spring of last year, 2016 into the summer, because I knew I needed to persuade Ira that this was the right move. And one reason I knew was because he knew what I knew, which was that if I made this move, he was gonna have to work like he had worked since he stepped down from the ACLU in 2001. He was gonna have to manage this transition, manage the search, step in and step up at the age of 78 going on 79, really, really step up. And when he said to me, Ethan, you've made the case. You've laid out the reasons, personal, organizational and political, why this is the right time for you, for this organization and for this movement. I understand what I gotta do. I'm gonna get you for it, but I understand what I gotta do. That was the pivotal moment. And so Ira, I remember when I went up to your place, your summer place in August of last year and we said, let's do it. We kept it a secret for five months. We went through the election. Should we change? Because we thought Hillary was gonna win and didn't happen that way. But we did it right. We did it right. And I so much appreciate, not just what you've been to me, to this movement, to this organization for almost 30 years and especially for the last 17, but the role you've played over this last year and supervising this transition and putting the term together that identified Maria, found the right person, did it right. I will be forever indebted. So please, these four people and Ira who's right here, please and Marcia, please just give them a round of applause and thanks from all of you. Look, it's not just drug policy alliance, it's everybody else. It's Kasia Melanuska and Daniel Wolfe and Jean-Paul Grunt from Who Worked at the Open Society Foundation. Amazing thing happened. It's my allies. You know, it's the cops at Leap who will never shut up, but God bless them because they've hit 100,000 Rotary clubs and are changing the world. And thank you, Neil and thank you, Jack Colby for them. It's Alan Clear and Harm Reduction Coalition and I remember Rod Sorge for those of you who remember him and Dave Purchase, a leader, a courageous leader on Needle Exchange. You know, Rick Doblin, the one man in this movement who's really gonna go down in history is Rick Doblin from MAPS because of the work he's doing on Psychedelics. SSDP from Betty Allworth today to all her predecessors making stuff happen. Julie Stewart at FAM, a courageous leader making stuff happen as well. Hey Keith and Alan, it normally you drove me crazy but you built an organization that could articulate the desires of marijuana consumers. Rob Campia, I wanna strangle you half the days of the week but I'm glad you're out there fighting the fight because we needed you as an ally. Steph Shear at A.S.A. American State Fair fighting for medical marijuana, God bless you on that. My allies at the ACLU, Gretchen Bergman, a new path. Hey Dorsey, all of us are none. That day you stood up in Long Beach and I knew where you're coming from and you're pushing me on stuff and you stood up there while your wife was struggling and you talked about as a former, somebody who'd been locked up not on drug charges who was coming our movement and become our ally on the ballot initiatives and you said, let me talk to you in the audience about medical marijuana, the role of methadone and the core value of personal sovereignty over our minds and bodies. I fell in love with you that day and I've never fallen out of love. Kenny, it's such an honor and pleasure to be up here with you today. To be last time I was in Atlanta was with you, I was going to that theological seminary, talk to those ministers, make it happen, it's an honor and I love you, I love the work you're doing what you said about the South. It's damn right, I'm glad we're here, I'm glad we're doing it and it's gonna keep, keep happening. Wow. But as you know, it ain't just the US either. I know what's going on, isn't it? But you look at the organizations, International Harm Reduction Association, Pat O'Hare who opened my eyes, Jerry Stimson who took it, Rick Lyons and his people there now, transformed, TNI, release, right? Steve Rolls is here today, Steve give me, just do an amazing, path-breaking work thinking about legalization. I look at my friends in Mexico and Mukad, the brave journalists who were represented here earlier today. I look at the other organizations fighting on the ground, I look at other national organizations, my friends in Canada, the political leadership, Donald MacPherson, the Harm Reduction Coalition, the Asian Harm Reduction Network, the European, the Eurasian, all of the people who inspire me day in and day out. You know, I was talking to my friend Harry and saying, well, so who's inspired me? Who should I be thanking? Well, one person I can't go without is Kurt Schmoke. Because when I talk about Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, I can't help putting Kurt Schmoke in that category. Because Kurt Schmoke is a young first term mayor who stands up almost the same day that I'm a young assistant professor who's just putting these intellectual ideas out there. And here is a young mayor, African-American, former chief prosecutor of Baltimore, gets himself elected, gives his first speech at the National Conference of Mayors, has his prepared speech about the drug war, the country's going crazy with the drug war, drug war hysteria, McCarthyism on steroids, and this brave mayor tosses down his speech and says, let me tell you about the drug war and provokes the debate about ending the drug war and puts out the notions of decriminalization and legalization, who pays the political price, who gets reelected twice in Baltimore, but probably forecloses a broader political future because of his courage. That was courage. That was courage. I remember standing on a national TV, on a national TV show back in 88 with Ted Koppel and I'm sitting and there's Charlie Rangel and Jesse Jackson either side of me joking. There's a one-term mayor I've ever seen it and I said, don't bet on it. And he came back and he did it and eventually those guys turned around and understood he was speaking the truth and they were the ones who had been wrong. That type of courage is true courage, but it's not just the leadership there. You know, it's the folks I look at, the ones who have been down on the streets, panting out the clean needles and risking the cops going back to the 80s and the early 90s, right? It's the activists from the Bronx and Brooklyn to Indonesia and Vietnam and going into parts of the Middle East and dangerous parts of South America and Mexico who are doing the right thing. It's the journalists risking their lives. It's the public defenders busting their butt at 80, 90s hours a week to help people. It's the prosecutors breaking ranks with all the other assholes in order to say the right thing and do the right thing. They say that not every prosecutor's gotta be an asshole. It's the people whose names oftentimes don't get recognized. It's the parents whose kids are suffering from Dervet syndrome and no medical model works and they are standing up on their kids and getting out there. It's the people dying of cancer, willing to stand up and say, I need my medicine. It's the mothers like Joy and others who lost their kids to an overdose who just wanna forget and close themselves off to that pain and who find the courage to stand up and say, I'm gonna join this movement. It's the people who Gretchen's pulled together who are struggling with addiction in their families and say just because I've seen the worst that drugs can do doesn't mean I'm not gonna also support the cause to end marijuana prohibition, to end mass incarceration and understand that drug policy reform and good drug treatment and helping those who struggle with drugs are all part and parcel of the same thing. Those are the people who inspire me. You need a board. I got a board. I let my board and people know early on because I had a fair amount of latitude who was gonna be on that board. The number one requirement to be on the DPA board wasn't about money, wasn't about this. Obviously you had to support the mission of the organization, but the number one requirement for board and for staff is you gotta be a mensch. Now for those of you who don't know what a mensch is, a mensch is a Yiddish word which means a good human being. It means a person who knows how to use their heart and their mind in order to do the right thing when the pressure's on. And when you have a staff and when you have a board of menschers who are smart and know how to use their hearts and their brains to do the right thing, you can do just about anything. And Kurt was on that board and Joe McNamara Brave Cop was on that board and Bob Sweetaberry Federal Judge was on that board. And also Pam Lictie, who I think is in this audience today and Christine Downen and Carl Hart and Ed Sanders and Fergie and Larry Campbell, the former mayor of Vancouver and a host of others, Jason Flan, the businessman and music executive. I mean, it was putting together a group that had my back while they held me accountable. And that was the essence of success for DPA going forward. And probably the single best part about all this, it's the fact that the people you work with and you fight with become your friends, become your dear friends. It's my brother from another planet, Harry Levine who has broken new ground on marijuana arrest and race who basically when you looked at Obama finally saying the right thing about marijuana was where Harry Levine's words coming out of his mouth. When you look, what turned this thing around, it was Harry Levine. But I don't get just appreciate Harry Levine as an activist scholar who's turned the New York Times and other major media around. I get to play with him as well as one of my best friends. And I get to hang out with Howard Josepher who you heard earlier and watch the Yankees and cheer for the Yankees. And if you hate the Yankees, fuck you, man, fuck you. I love the Yankees. Fuck them, you know? So let me just say this. Here's, I always said it. I sometimes regret, you know, for DPA we've always been sort of one third marijuana, one third drug sentencing reform, ending mass incarceration, and one third harm reduction. That's what we've done. For better or worse, marijuana has grabbed the headlines and been our most dramatic success. And I'm extremely proud of the success we accomplished in helping playing a key role in the country going from 25% support for legalizing to an unimaginable 60%. In legalizing medical marijuana, was it 30 states now and other ones? I mean, people are now kind of, well, yes, yes, and we have to do this the right way and it has to be social justice and we have to figure out the right ways to do racial and social justice in a country which is the most dynamic example of dynamic capitalism and crony capitalism in history. We gotta do that. But that success and victory don't sneeze at it because it helped change everything. And when marijuana accounts for half the drug arrest in this country, it is making a dramatic difference. I feel proud of the battles we won on harm reduction in legalizing access to sterile syringes in New York and New Jersey and California. I feel proud of the work that we did on the lock zone and Good Samaritan, organizing the first conference on this issue back in 2000 when nobody was paying attention to this issue, setting up grants programs on this thing and changing these laws to good Sam laws. And now I'm just forgetting, I forgot to thank one other group of staff, our legal affairs office. Holy shit, how did I do it? I know I was gonna do it. Dan Abramson who joined me back in 96 and was by my side for 20 years drafting legislation and hiring the most extraordinary team, Judy Appel, the dynamic team of Tamar Todd and Tessian Naidu and Lindsey LaSalle, right? Joy Havelin and Jolene Foreman. I mean, you wanna talk about a dynamic all-woman law firm. There ain't no better all-woman law firm in America. Already better law firm, period, than what we got going on right there. The battles we won on these things, the hundreds of state laws we have now changed, the civil asset fort battles that we won, legalizing medical marijuana in one state after another, working hand-in-hand with our allies on the ground in various states and with MPP and others. I am so proud of those victories. Change in drug sentencing laws, increasing access to drug treatment, doubling funding for drug treatment, advancing harm reduction in every which way, lining up one victory after another, the ones that Maria was just reporting on over this weekend, the one that DPA California our allies did so beautifully. Those victories, maybe one day we'll tell some of the stories because you know how difficult those things are. I know how many years it took to legalize clean needles in New York, New Jersey, and New Mexico. I remember the tears of Roseanne and Rena and others when we got right to within two yards of the finish of the goal line and some asshole legislator, some committee chair killed it at the last moment. But we did change things. We did save tens of thousands of lives. We did provide medication with a marijuana and a lockstone or a methadone to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who would not otherwise have had it. We did reduce the incarceration of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. Those are real victories. And at the same time, we transform consciousness. If there was a growing consensus, Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions accepted that the drug war and mass incarceration has gone far, I'm proud of the role that we played. We were the first to define this issue as a racial justice issue. Didn't happen yesterday. It happened with Rockefeller drug rule reform beginning in the late 1990s. It happened by making Connecticut the first state to define medical marijuana as a racial justice issue back 10, 12 years ago. It happened with marijuana legalization in DC more recently. We did this stuff because the commitment to racial justice and its centrality in the effort to end the war on drugs has been part of DPI's identity throughout. And I'm delighted that now it has the opportunity to soar and to manifest itself and to build a new movement. When we had that town hall two years ago with Black Lives Matter and for the first time we had a new civil rights movement that was standing up and speaking DPA language on drug policy reform while pushing us on issues of racial justice. That's what this needed to be. So when I asked myself, what do I help for the future? Well, I mean, obviously one of the things I'm doing now is letting go. I am letting go. Before I started the organization, when I had Georgia's commitment, I went to see a very wise man named Ram Dass. Some of you know Ram Dass used to be Richard Alpert but a wise man. He gave me two pieces of advice. The first one was, Ethan, you need to learn to love William Bennett. Now for those of you too young to remember William Bennett, William Bennett was the first drug czar at the peak of the drug war, one of the most hateful, evil, putrid human beings in the face of America. And Ram Dass is saying to me, Ethan, you gotta learn to love William Bennett. I almost gagged when he said that. But I knew what he meant. Which is that if somehow we can't find the way to cross over, to find that little bit of humanity amidst the fear and the hate and everything else, they drove Donald Trump into the White House. If we can't find the way to reach the people who are doing the wrong things for all the wrong reasons, but who are still human beings with children who love people and try to lead decent lives, if we can't find that, we don't win. We don't win, you know? I'm driven by rage oftentimes, by rage against injustice and I'm angry about it. But I also know that there are times and places to manifest that and times and places where we gotta figure out how we reach across and under and around and into people's hearts who can't believe that they would ever embrace us. I think Ram Dass is right about that. But the other thing he said to me is, you gotta learn to let go of your attachment to the things that you're fighting for. And what I took him to mean by that was, win or lose, this struggle is the right one. Win or lose, whether we were victorious in all these battles or not, it was still the right choice to commit one's life to this cause for myself and for all of you. Now winning, of course, is all the hell of a lot nicer and I wanna keep winning and see this thing keep winning. But it also meant that in stepping down and part of why I felt so light and free while I'm here and people keep coming at me, you think, yeah, you look happy and I am, I'm happy. I'm happy about the fact that this transition is going so well, I'm happy about the work and the commitment of my colleagues, I'm happy about Maria coming in, I'm happy about the strength of the team and this movement, but I'm also letting go. I'm letting go and knowing that this thing needs to grow to its next generation in the same way, you send your baby, your child out there or they don't send them out there, they go out there and they do things that you may not always approve or I'm letting go, but my hopes, my desires is that this can continue to be a movement that is grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights. It's my hope that we have the strength and the ability to argue fiercely and ferociously with one another and keep come back, love it. I remember the early days of the old Drug Policy Foundation, I forgot to give a shout out to Arnold Treback and Kevin Zeiss, the founders of the old Drug Policy Foundation. I remember when the debates over is addiction a disease or not, almost split this organization in the early years and they remain vibrant and powerful and crucial debates today where people still on either side of that debate have to come together to end the drug war and the debates and the challenges of how we talk about and handle and negotiate the intersection between racial justice and drug policy reform, how painful that is, how difficult that is, how we have to understand and be able to hear one another. I hope that we will continue to be that. In fact, not just continue but be even more so that, how we can recognize our fundamental commonality of values and desires and keep going back to the one greatest value and feeling that will lead to victory, which is love. It's loving one another, it's compassion, it's empathy for one another and drawing strength from that compassion and empathy for one another and being able to expand it and extend it even to those who it is most challenging to do so. I hope, I hope and believe that we will continue to be a movement that is not just about drugs but that it's about advancing broader values because of the values we believe and the values we articulate, that in addressing people's fears around drugs and their children and around race and everything else in crime, that we will be a model that can help this country, and other countries find a place in a new dialogue in the midst of the rise of right-wing populism and fascism and extremism and white supremacism that we need to be a voice, a leader, a model for how we engage that. We need to avoid joining one side but be a voice for how we speak to this. I hope, I hope that that core principle that has guided me and this organization and a significant part of this movement for so long, this basic belief that nobody, but nobody deserves to be punished for what we put in our bodies if we don't hurt anybody but else. That nobody, but nobody deserves to be punished or discriminated against or amongst based solely upon what we put in our bodies if we don't hurt anybody else. That there is no legitimate basis in science and medicine and ethics of the Bible for discriminating or distinguishing among human beings based what substance they put in their body, that there is no basis to saying to the parent who God forbid is two children addicted to drugs, one being booze and the other one being heroin or cocaine, that we are gonna distinguish in our laws or our values or our belief system between how that sun is treated and that sun is treated, that that core value, that value of human rights that is at the core of this movement, of civil liberties as the core of this movement, that it lies at the core of uprooting the racism of the drug war, even though it doesn't look like it's there, it is at the core of this movement and of their ability to uproot the manifestations of racism in this drug war, that that value cannot be abandoned. It's not just about stigma. It's not just about toleration of people who are addicted. It's about understanding that people who use drugs should not be discriminated solely because they use this one or that. And that principle needs to continue to drive us into the future. It is the next frontier of freedom. In an era when freedom is being diminished, when the threat to this country is never greater than that presented by Donald Trump, when the dark side of America, the ugly side, the father Coglins and the McCarthyism and the George Wallace and the bigotry and the racism and the xenophobia, which never before took the White House the way it has, it's there right now, we need to be the voice for decency, for human rights, for how to communicate and dialogue with one another. So as I was said, and as Cory Booker said, I ain't going anywhere. I am, you know, I got 30 years down and I'm 60 now and I see 30 years ahead, maybe more. I am delighted that Maria is there to carry the burdens of fundraising and budgets and audits and staff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're gonna do it, Maria. I know you're gonna do it well with a lot of fantastic support from our colleagues. But I'm not going anywhere. I'm taking a break. I'm enjoying life. My only plan right now is no plan. But what I'm also telling you is I ain't going away. I'm gonna be more out there outside this country and inside than ever before doing what I love, what I've always wanted to do, which is helping whoever I can to end this miserable war on drugs and to advance freedom in our country and around the world. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being my allies, my colleagues, my friends, God bless. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you. I love you all. I appreciate you all. I'll be back. I'll see you in St. Louis in two years and we're gonna do it. Thank you so much.