 So if you were listening carefully on Friday morning, I told you you have a special treat to open up the plenary tonight. And that is, there is really nobody elected to office whoever stuck his neck out so far and did so much to transform the debate about the drug war and drug policy in America. And that is the former mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke. Hey, you know, I explained to you on Friday why we're renaming the LaDen Award to the Kurt Schmoke Award. And it's gonna be going from that, you know, henceforth. But I gotta tell you back in the late 80s when I was teaching at Princeton and starting to write and speak and then this elected official just stood up at a conference of mayors. And as I told you, threw his notes away and said, this drug war makes no sense. And he didn't just say it once. He continued saying it through 12 years in office. He joined the boards of this organization. Then he became the dean at Howard University Law School. He kept speaking out. He's now the president of the University of Baltimore. He is my friend. He is my ally. He has been an extraordinary leader for this movement and in this country, Kurt Schmoke, Kurt, please come on up. Thank you, Ethan. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. This is an overly generous introduction. I know that I ask Ethan to simply say that I'm the only elected official who read his article and then repeated it somewhere. But I've been a disciple of Ethan Natelman for a long time, along with Deborah Small, who I wanted to stand up and applaud. But I really do want to thank each and every one of you for joining this outstanding conference. It does my heart good to know that it continues to grow. I see people who are brothers and sisters from around the world who are engaged in a wonderful, wonderful fight to make some improvement, to bring sense and sensibility and justice to this fight. For me, it seems like I was talking to Cassandra and I told her that I'm almost an historical figure now. I've been around so long that it was 1988 that I went to that conference that Ethan was talking about. And it was a conference, a joint conference, of police officers and mayors from around the country. And what triggered a change in my mind, I had been a prosecutor before being mayor and a good friend of mine named Marty Ward was an officer who was working in undercover police operation wearing a body wire and he happened to be killed by the person who he was there to arrest. And it dawned on me at that time that at least in our community we had more people who were hooked on drug money than hooked on drugs. And it seemed to me that we weren't going to make improvements in our community until we found a way to take the profit out of distributing drugs at the street level and that led more and more thinking and then fortunately read Ethan's work and was able to bring some sense to my inchoate ideas. I heard that you listened to Dan Moerheim, a delegate Dan Moerheim at the conference. He is continuing the battle in our state. Just recently at Johns Hopkins we had a conference and we looked at a number of issues many of which you have considered over the last few days decriminalization, legalization, medicated assisted treatment, needle exchange and safe injection facilities, a sentencing and reentry and then treatment on demand. And the thing that was so interesting and I'm sure you found in your conference is that when we identified examples of progress being made we could see it in cities, in states, in countries so it was just coming together and collaborating on an international basis that we're able to move this thing forward. This is not just a local problem or national problem as we all know, this is an international problem. If we can solve it internationally we will save a lot of lives and help communities around the world. So I just came by to say thank you. I appreciate the award being named for me though. I really beg the Ethan, let me be hyphenated with Lydane but it just didn't work out that way. But keep going and stay optimistic. I just remember that in just getting needle exchange back in the 80s in Baltimore nobody said that we could get it done and yet we persisted and we brought friends in. In fact we brought friends in from Rotterdam who helped us out a great deal in persuading our legislature, we're gonna make progress, we're gonna win on this and we're gonna win not just because there's a narrow group of advocates, we're gonna win because people will understand that this is all about justice, this is about fairness, this is about bringing science, not politics to the war and drugs and hopefully the best days of our countries are still ahead of us. Thank you all very much.