 We've reached the moment that so many of you have been waiting for. Richard J. Dennis is a successful businessman, philosopher and philanthropist and an extraordinary advocate for free and more democratic societies. His support was absolutely critical to the early success of the Drug Policy Foundation and eventually the Drug Policy Alliance. The award named for him is given to the individuals who most epitomize loyal opposition to drug war extremism. So to present this year's Richard J. Dennis Drug Peace Award for outstanding achievement in the field of drug policy reform to Ethan Nadelman, please welcome, I'm very honored to welcome, DPA Board Chair Ira Glasser. So as Senator Booker just said, we have a lot of work to do, even as we celebrate the enormous amount of ground we've gained. And that about sums up the career and life of Ethan Nadelman. You know, I was told you got to introduce this man, you don't have to introduce him, everybody knows him, and you have to say what's appropriate as a receiver of this award in a few minutes. And it isn't easy to think about how to sum up what Ethan Nadelman has achieved. So I thought about some analogies, and it seems to me that in our history every great social justice movement and movement for fundamental rights begins with the vision of a few people, a vision which at the outset seems highly improbable of being realized, unrealistic, even delusional. Think about it. It's 1909 and W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida Wells and a few other people, a handful really, start an organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And their goal is to stop lynchings, their goal is to undo the subjugation of Jim Crow laws, their goal is to replace the law of Jim Crow with the civil rights legal infrastructure. It's 1909 in America, and they are crazy enough to start an organization with that vision. It's 1909 where there are peak lynchings every day, where the idea that there could ever be a time when Jim Crow laws vanished from the south was something you would have to be on a substance that is banned right now in order to even think about. Or think about 1920, the man named Roger Baldwin and a woman named Crystal Eastman and a few other people, a handful really, in a hotel room in New York, begin an organization called the American Civil Liberties Union, and their goal is to protect the entire bill of rights for everybody in the country all over the country. 35, 40 people, no budget, at a time when it was still a crime in this country to teach evolution, at a time when the Supreme Court, after 129 years after the bill of rights was passed as law, had never once, not once, struck down a law or a government action on First Amendment grounds, not once, when there was no freedom of religion, when there was no due process of law, when 90% of all the rights you wake up with and take for granted today didn't exist back then. They were going to do this for the whole country. Crazy, delusional. Or think of Margaret Sanger who in 1916 was arrested every other day in New York City for handing out leaflets to give women information about birth control and who opened up the first birth control clinic in the country in 1916. And a few years later started an organization called the American Birth Control League which changed its name a few years later into Planned Parenthood. And she had the crazy idea that women ought to be able to control their own bodies and that their economic progress and independence depended on it. Delusional. Or think of that handful of brave gay men in 1969, that early summer's day at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in New York. Were they there? I stand corrected, do you see? I always think I know history when I don't. And they had the illusion that they were just going to fight the cops if need be and that's what they did that day. And they had an illusion of trying to create equal rights of all kinds for LGBT people. I was in the city that day in 1969, newly at the ACLU, and it seemed like all the other movements delusional at the time. There isn't one of those movements that still doesn't have a long way to go. And there isn't one of those movements who made more progress to date than anybody at the time thought was possible. Ethan Nadelman stands in that tradition. In the 1980s, he came out of a faculty position at Princeton with a few other people along with him with the delusional idea that the war on drugs was an outrage to individual liberty and fundamental human rights and dignity and had to be stopped and could be stopped. In those days, like all the other movements, it seemed delusional. And like all the other movements, we sit here about 20 years later and we know we have very, very far to go yet, but it is also true. And I was there at the start, when he first started to talk about this, that there was almost no one who thought he wasn't being, if not delusional, quixotic. How is it possible to do that and turn that around? Well, here we are. And if you even said back then that there would come a day when 1,500 people from dozens of countries of all sexes and colors and inclinations and beliefs and religions would be united, connected together around that set of goals, even that achievement seemed impossible to imagine back then. So, of all the people who have ever gotten this Richard Dennis Award, none deserve it more than Ethan Needleman. Ethan, that baton that I gave, that I took from you, even though you threw it down and you said, I'm stepping down, Senator Booker is right. You can step down, but we know where you live. And that baton that I gave to Maria a few days ago, my God, you carried it so bravely and so brilliantly for such a long way to bring us all where we are today. It is hard to do anything else but say thank you and get your ass up here.