 Thank you, thank you so much, thank you so much. And a gorgeous, beautiful Sunday is made to see you all out here for this in this room with all the stuff we know, so thank you for spending your busy day here, for the energy, for all of this. So how should I ask you to reflect? You know, I think I've been involved with this for so long. And as I'm sitting here, I'm flashing back. I'm flashing back to the profound apathy and lack of interest in this subject 10 years ago, 15 years ago, among so many people. I'm flashing back to 20, 25 years ago, and I was getting going, when a room like this would be go home in drug war. Lock them up, give them treatment, lock them up, give them treatment, and when that was the conventional mindset among white, black, and brown throughout the city and around the country, we've come a long way, come a very long way. I remember in the early years when the first meetings and what was called the Drug Policy Foundation Day and it was basically a couple hundred white people, one or two black people. Basically, the academics, a few people do a needle exchange, a few people who don't ever want a little bit, maybe just the beginning of somebody looking for reasons. So we really have come a long way, we really have come a long way. Now, I think with a hundred plus nine, I've said this as the GPA by any old, some months ago, I think across to grow, what things you most need to know to be cognizant of our history, to know what we came out of, what we came from, what we came from. I was talking with Carl Williams before about, you know, what happened in Black Lives Matter, what happened in Bill Clinton in 1994 to Primack, and it's already been overjoyed, because I remember when that Primack happened and I was a spickle, it was, and all the people around the ground back. What I also remember was all the people around the ground back and how that was the conventional frame of a conventional democratic, not only the outside of the Republic, we've come a long way. Now, when I was thinking about the opening conference this morning, and I wouldn't be sat in the head, you know, I've heard jazz as a frustration, but let's not talk about what was going through in the head, let's try to talk about what we do instead, let's do things, let's get into action. I like when Spongebob and I would say, as a rare Republic official, make sure that people in office are doing what they need to do. People who can talk a sweet line, they ain't doing shit. Some of them sound tough, but it's just covered for trying to do what's right. So focusing on what those people with power are really doing, what they're really doing to make it happen, that's terrible. Cassandra, my colleague, says, isn't it going to change? It's got to be about organizing. It's got to be about mole-izing. It's got to be about getting smarter. It's got to be taking energy and the creativity and the combustion that come out of this room today and turning it into something focused and sharp. Because as we know, advocacy and effective organizing advocacy is not simply about valuing what you think you people need to hear. It's about thinking about how you take what needs to be done and get other people to do what needs to be done when you do not possess all the power. When you possess a part of the power, when you have to magnify your power. Now we're doing that in more and more places around the country and I'm proud of my colleagues who are about to do that in different states. But that element of organizing in a disciplined way and tapping into, is something that's happening right now? In other words, it always seemed like every decade each new generation coming into their late teens and 20s was exactly the same as the group before. But that's not true of this generation. There's something new going on here. And I just hope that the next generation 10 years from now is even more so that way. Although I've seen enough waves going down and we have to roll with what we've got. And those are what Carl's saying. Come out as possible already. That'll be drug use. That'll be who you are. It's a long time to know who to come out. They're the only people who can come out for a long time where people would fuck up on drugs and they were clean, sober, sobriety. And God bless them. Yes, God bless them. But they were the only ones entitled to have a voice. The people who were using and continuing to use and whether they were struggling or whether they were thriving were not allowed to have a voice. They were not allowed to speak about the positive roles that drugs played in their life or about the equivalent roles that they played. You know, 50 years ago everybody in America knew a homosexual. They just didn't know they knew a homosexual. And then for their image of who was a homosexual was what they read about in the newspapers for somebody in the rest of the adventure or somebody who's playing boy and gay or whatever it might be, right? Now it's for five or ten years that not everybody in America knows a homosexual. They know somebody who is gay or lesbian or whatever it might be. And because they know these people, now they know their cousins and their siblings and their employees and their friends and all this, it becomes so much more difficult to discriminate and to have outrageous assumptions out there. Well the same thing is true about all of us who use drugs. Our ability, our willingness to find the ways to come out of it, I choose right. Don't be careful. Because lots of people here still work in places where you get drug tested. Lots of people here still have children to worry about losing their kids and no record of worry about losing their kids. Lots of people, right? Lots of people worry about, oh my god, is it's out and I'm a drug user? Well then when my friend goes over to it, when my kid goes over to it, his kid's house and their parents are going to say they can't go to my house. So we know it's there. But figuring out the ways in which we take the risks to come out, to open up, whether it's just in our family in just that small world and to be open to educate people older that too is the element. And you know, I look the way Art and I had that conversation about the drug dealers, the drug sellers. Because they're called dealers, right? We know the dealers is a negative word, right? Drug sellers, right? Drug entrepreneurs. And it's a complicated issue. Because, you know, even when you make something legal, as we know from the case of Eric Arner, it doesn't mean people are still not going to get busted for selling outside of that legally regulated system. But it does mean you're removing the core. You're removing the core. You're removing the core of this thing. Now, how do we think about people who sell drugs? Art tries to raise that question. Sometimes internally we have a conversation of, you know, if you're talking about policing and how you release drug markets, the real distinction you have to make is not between people who use drugs and people who sell drugs. Right? The bottom line is nobody uses drugs to be punished simply when they put it in the body after Arner does it. And that's a bottom line core principle that nobody deserves to be punished when they put it in the body and run with it. Look like, sound like, smell like, whatever. As long as they're not hurting anybody else. But when it comes to people who sell, I have to say, my perspective has always been that we do make a distinction among people who sell drugs. And the distinction is less about whether it's legal or illegal to just to sell it. It's whether it's, excuse my French, whether it's whether they're an asshole, drug dealer, or non-ass people, or anything. Are they taking pride in the quality of the product they sell? Or are they selling shit, shit, that's going to hurt people with all these new so I got, not giving a damn what it's cut with, what it's going to do to people? Are they selling it to people or are they doing it in a way that's respectful of community norms that are seen as they're providing for a market in the community? Or are they exploiting and trying to grow? Are they strutting it down the street, intimidating people? Or are they trying to be polite of the environment in the community in which they live? The whole notion that we got to get drug deals out of town, we don't get drug deals out of town, so those who want to buy drugs, those who want to sell it. And the question could be, what are the conditions that we're thinking to sell? We're thinking about the marijuana market. But if we're going to keep it illegal, we still have to make a distinction about how people are going to do that. Are they going to respect the consumer? Are they going to respect their neighbor? Are they going to respect society and providing the substance for which there is a market? Whether that market is a person who's addicted to that substance or whether that's a person who's just using it casually and responsible for whatever it might be. It seems to be death because in a way it's a decent drug policy, a decent one, a fair one. One that treats fellow human beings the way you and your children are treated, the way you would want to be treated. We tend to think that we want to reduce the role of criminalization and the criminal justice system in drug control as much as possible, that there is no apparent reason why this system of drug control needs to be a fundamentally criminalized system. We do have a moral obligation and a policy imperative to move away from a reliance on criminalization to a different type of frame. But as we make that evolution, the guiding principles have to be how we treat fellow human beings. What type of side you have are we respecting individual freedom and simultaneously respecting the norms of the community in terms of the public places that it cares about. Now, that last question, Susan Burr, and I'm sorry I cannot give you the specs realises. Ah, shut up! I'm not a business person and I don't know how to do that stuff. And it's hard to say that it's hard to put all of the economic in a quality and then the racial in a quality in a way capital is distributed on drug policy reform. What I can tell you is that when we draw policy lines we will at least make the good faith effort. We can't take it out of all of regards to capitalism. As much as anybody can. And maybe one day some of you, some of us will lead the revolution that will change this. But I can tell you we can try. And so I think I'm proud of what we did in California. California's Maryland Legalization Initiative it is going to be the first one that really takes on these issues. It is the first legalization initiative that explicitly says that people who have had a felony conviction will have a chance to participate in a legal argument. That's big. We used to have a lot of alcohol but in the alcohol world you oftentimes can't get a license to sell booze if you've had criminal convictions. So we're going beyond where alcohol was. People talk a lot about reparations. This initiative actually has reparations in it. With a significant portion of the tax revenue being generated by this initiative is going to communities that have been harmed by the drug war. And we've got that into that initiative. You're not going to see us singing about it when we're going to the final stretch of the campaign because we don't think that element in the initiative is what's going to win over the suburban moms, you know, whatever voter, but it is in there and you should know it. And when it comes to helping people clean their criminal records to prior convictions these two initiatives will go further than anyone ever did before. But I'm telling you something else. The future is we are trying to move a system from a prohibition system to a non prohibition system. We cannot control that. We EPA, we the broader movement. I would say that if California wins and some of the other organizations win this time our influence overall is going to diminish and diminish because quite frankly the people who are going to make money from this state are going to be making money and they're going to be driving these things on their own. We can set a model but the ability to ensure that the model we're providing in California becomes a model for other states around the country is going to depend on our compassion to mobilize. Now, and if the money is going to be distributed beyond the ways that we are trying to do in this initiative you can change the law but also there's other things that play. We can't provide the answers for how to mobilize capital although we can try to do things that help to get that movement. But in the end I think any prohibition, I don't think this is where I'm just going to finish with these words. I got involved this a long time ago because it seemed to me that the war on drugs and the prohibition is laws and institutions and mindsets in which it was indebted were fundamental evil in our society. That's what moved me. That the notion that I could live in a state where almost half the people going to prison were going there for a rocket-gold and drug law violation where people could think that we were enforcing drug laws that were grounded in science and racism of the 19th and 20th century. That's what moved me. When we mobilized in New York you can see that 95, 96% of all the people locked up in New York State prison the rocket-gold and drug law violation were black or brown even though they had no resemblance to the percentage they were actually dealing with. When you can look at Los Angeles County and now what non-minority person was prosecuted for a crack cocaine violation for years after those laws were moved you know that this thing was permeated with racism. You know. And so I have remained and will remain focused on undoing and draining the power and force from prohibitious laws in our society. I will in DPA will be committed to opening up and transforming the notions and the bigotry and ignorance around drug use and drug users that stands in the way of serious repulsion for even among people who say that they are committed to criminal justice reform. Because we can't let our own trenches and ignorance stand in the way of going where we need to go. We cannot on our own solve the challenges of American capitalism. But we can take this monstrosity known as the drug war that has resulted in the incarceration of millions and the arrest of tens of billions disproportionately people of color black and brown and poor and we can drag that thing out of our society in a way will other things replace it? I think they will. Will the force of the drug war in the 1980s and 90s of that decade no it will not. Because it was a particularly prohibitious system that played on everything that was fearful and wrong in our society. We can uproot that. Today was a wonderful day. Denver the words you said about Asha were so true and I am so grateful to like