 I see the dark skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell before the whip and steel, the last blood pooling, the last breath spitting. I see the immigrant street vendor flashing his wallet to the cops, shot so many times there are bullet holes in the sole of his feet. I see the deaf woodcarver and his pocket knife crossing the street in front of a cop who yells, then fires. I see the drug raid, the wrong door kicked in, the minister's heart seizing up. I see the man hawking a fistful of cigarettes, the cop's chokehold that makes his wheezing lungs stop wheezing forever. I see the poets who will write the songs of insurrection, generations unborn will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves still fled and the descendants of slave catchers still shot them. How we awoke every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every paw. In so many ways, this is the best and worst of times for drug policy reform. There have just been, you know, a tidal wave of extraordinary successes, mind-blowing victories for marijuana decriminalization and legalization, seems as though we have reached a tipping point. And yet, at the same time, in this same very moment, we face an unprecedented drug crisis in this country. Drug overdoses are at a record high, making the crack epidemic seem somewhat mild. Now the crack epidemic killed just a tiny fraction of those who are dying of opioid overdoses today. And yet a literal war was declared on poor people of color, a purely punitive, militaristic response prevailed. There are few politicians lasting the mostly white opioid addicts, portraying them as people worthy of care and compassion, not despicable scum of the earth that has to be gotten rid of by any means necessary. Things are very, very different this time around. And we all know why. Whiteness makes a difference. If the overwhelming majority of the users and dealers of opioids today were black rather than right, we wouldn't have police chiefs competing with each other over whose department is showing more compassion to people struggling with drug addiction or drug abuse. I should have been able to go to treatment instead of prison when a policeman killed my five-year-old son and I used drugs to medicate my grief and pain. And I was criminalized. I was sent to prison over and over again. No one ever thought about treatment for me while I believe that treatment is the better approach. But because I'm a black woman, I was put in prison. Why is racial justice so central in terms of drug policy reform in America? Racial justice is absolutely intertwined with the war on drugs in the United States. From its very beginning over a century ago, the war on drugs was focused on people who were different from the white majority then. So first it was used to stigmatize Chinese people in the U.S. saying, oh, they were the ones responsible for opioids. Then it was black people. Then it was Latinos. And it's always been tied up with this effort to oppress and paint communities of color, paint disfavored communities as criminals, as bad people who should be locked up. Black and white people and brown people all use drugs at the same rates in the United States. But black people and brown people are far more likely than white people to be arrested. And that's because the war on drugs has been used as an excuse to heavily police communities of color. The drug war in particular have reproduced the social order of slavery in the same way that the Jim Crow laws did beginning in the 19th century. Louisiana is a very special case. We're the most locked up political entity in the world. And I'm a little late. I apologize. I was actually working on a brief to the Louisiana Supreme Court on a second appeal over a young black man who's given 20 years in prison day for day for 3.5 grams of marijuana. Today in the paper, we had a big package of sentencing reforms go through in Louisiana. And they kick in November 1. Today we have one of our sheriffs actually called the press conference to complain because they're forcing us to release all the good ones. These are the people that we can send out. We can rent out. We can rent them out. And we can make money off of them. And the legislature has passed this law that's going into effect at the end of this month. And I'm going to lose all my good prisoners. This is the racism that's at the core of what's gone on and driven this drug war from the beginning. We're told that this new found tolerance and compassion for white users and abusers of illegal drugs will translate into a permanent ceasefire in the drug war and that the shifts in law and policy will inevitably benefit people of all races and classes in the long run. I have my doubts about this. Imagine pot being legalized near the peak of the crack epidemic. And then try to imagine that all of the new legal drug empires that are being led by young black men with wild afros and tattoos rather than hipster white men with cute pony tails and beards. No, it wouldn't happen, just no. Well, we have seen tremendous progress with marijuana legalization taking off in state after state through ballot initiatives, not just medical marijuana, which is actually now in multiple dozens of states, but full marijuana legalization, even for recreational use. The challenge for us now is making sure that marijuana legalization happens the right way, that the people who have been most affected by marijuana prohibition are able now to benefit from legalization, that the people who have been imprisoned, who have had felony convictions for marijuana, now have those records expunged. So that's why Proposition 64, which passed in California last year, included measures to make sure that taxes for marijuana legalization went back to the communities that were most affected, for example. And that's why we now, when we're pushing for marijuana legalization in New York and New Jersey and New Mexico and at the federal level, we've been fighting to include provisions like that. How do you see the chances that the Trump administration can reverse some of the reforms that happened in the previous few years? Well, I think they already are reversing some reforms. The Trump administration has made very clear that they are going to use the war on drugs as a way to go after marginalized communities, communities of color, immigrants in particular. I think if they really go after the states that have legalized marijuana, that's going to be horribly unpopular. It's going to be viewed as federal interference in a state matter, and it could haunt them. I am not sure that we've hit our bottom. And if the trajectory continues the way our administration wants it to continue, yeah, I think it could get worse. I believe that there is momentum that's building in progressive communities that can counter, that can be the antidote to the direction that the administration really is intent on taking us down. So while I'm pragmatic, I'm going to have that earthquake bag by my side. I'm also hopeful. How to change the public attitudes to the drug war and drugs? If I knew how to change the public attitudes around racism, I would have been done it. I don't know how to change people's core beliefs about black people and brown people. I don't know how to do that. If I did, I'd have been done it. But what I do know how to do is to help those communities that have been, especially women, that have been impacted harshly by and equated and ineffective drug policies. And that's what I do.