 Good morning, everyone. I'm so happy to be here with you. Thank you, Ira, for that wonderful introduction. I am so lucky to have you as chairman of our board and as a partner, such a giant in civil liberties and drug reform, such a wise leader who is helping me learn all about this organization and be the most effective leader I can be. I want to thank a few other people, starting with Ethan Nadelman, who has done so much to help build this movement into the force that it now is. I first met Ethan several years ago, and I was so blown away by his intelligence, his vast knowledge, his ability to keep so much information in his head, his commitment and his passion for this issue, and I am so happy that we get to keep working with Ethan now as a partner in this ongoing struggle, because his passion remains undiminished. I want to thank my DPA colleagues for having given me such a warm welcome and the transition team and Derek and everybody else who has helped make this process so smooth, and I want to thank everybody who put so many hours and weeks and months of work into making this reform conference the best ever. We have so many wonderful events this weekend. We have Michelle Alexander speaking very soon. We have a collaboration with Afropunk. We have a candlelight vigil where we can commemorate those lives we have lost to this war. We have a town hall to talk about reparations, and we have scores and scores of panels and community sessions and other meetings. I am so excited about the next few days, and I want to thank everybody who's in this room for coming here today. I am so excited to get to meet all of you. We have more than, we have about 1500 people in this room from around 50 countries around the world, people from the front lines of the war on drugs, people who are saving lives, people who use drugs, people who are in law enforcement, we have doctors, we have family members, we have formerly incarcerated people, we have activists, people from all walks of life, all political backgrounds, people who, as Ethan would have said, love drugs, people who hate drugs, and people who don't give a damn about drugs, but are united by our conviction that the war on drugs has to end. I want to tell you a little bit more about why I'm here. I've devoted my career to fighting social injustice and for human rights. I first got my introduction to the war on drugs in a very real way when I was working on Columbia, the South American country, in many years ago. I was the Columbia researcher for human rights watch, and I was in charge of documenting abuses that were being committed in that country by various groups who were at war. There were left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and the military, all involved for decades in this brutal, brutal conflict. And I spoke to people who had survived massacres of entire towns, who had seen their family members raped, tortured, killed, who had lost people to disappearances, who had themselves been forced to flee their communities, becoming forcibly displaced and living on slums on the outskirts of town. And these were millions of people who were being affected by this war. And I also realized, though, that this wasn't just a matter of a conventional war where people were fighting each other for ideological reasons. Everything had become distorted because of the war on drugs, because many of the groups who were fighting in Columbia were funding themselves through the illicit market in drugs. And that meant that the United States, which had identified Columbia as a major cocaine supplier to the U.S., had itself poured huge amounts of money into the country's military. Now, if you looked at it closely, that made no sense, because even if you did want to fight and dismantle the groups that were engaged in drug trafficking in that country, putting the money in the Colombian military was in a way actually helping those groups, because the Colombian military was so often collaborating with the paramilitary groups who were behind so many of the massacres and killings and who were among the biggest drug traffickers in the country. So that raised some really big questions for me about what the point of it all was. And then I discovered something else, which is that whenever the U.S. claimed a success in the war on drugs and the Colombian government claimed a success because they arrested a drug trafficking leader, or they killed one, or they extradited them to the United States, or they claimed that a group had demobilized. You know what happened? Another one came in. Another person stepped in, filled their shoes, and continued doing exactly the same thing as they were doing before. And the reason for that was that the illicit market in drugs is so profitable, that as long as it exists, as long as drugs are prohibited, and there is an illegal market in drugs, you are going to have organized crime that's involved in distributing it. An organized crime is going to engage in violence and is going to commit horrific crimes to keep control of those markets. So again, what is the point of all of this? Then later on, I moved on and I did work on U.S. foreign policy. And I saw the same patterns in Afghanistan and in Mexico, the U.S. pouring billions and billions of dollars into a war that will never, ever end. Later on, I started working on the United States. I wanted to see what was happening in my own backyard. And I discovered that again, the war on drugs was distorting so many systems in this country because the war on drugs here is an excuse for policies that have devastated communities across the United States. It's an excuse for over a million arrests every year of people who have done nothing more than use drugs personally without harming others. It's an excuse for heavy policing of black and brown communities and which sets a stage for the arrest, the disproportionate arrests of people from those communities and sets a stage for police killings of people in those communities. It's the excuse for surveillance on a large scale of people across this country and beyond. It's the excuse for taking kids from their parents. It's the excuse for arresting pregnant women. It's the excuse for locking up 135,000 people a day and stripping those people when they've been convicted of their access to housing, of access to education, of access to food stamps. It's the excuse for deporting thousands of people tearing them away from their families because of old drug offenses. It's an excuse for damaging our democracy by taking away voting rights from millions of people. And I have to ask myself, if all of these people who have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions had been able to vote, what would our government look like today? And all of this for what? To protect health? I don't think so. Prison only offers a revolving door. It doesn't offer solutions. And we're seeing overdose rates soaring in the midst of this war. All of this has brought me to one very clear conviction, which is that the war on drugs may not be the solution to all social justice problems, but it's a huge part of addressing them. And I personally am proud to commit myself to this struggle now. I'll tell you another reason I'm excited. The war on drugs may not be over, but we are seeing victory. We are seeing in the last five, 10, 15, 20 years, how so many changes have been happening. I mean, just yesterday, the news about Governor Brown in California signing the RISE Act, which eliminates sentencing enhancements for drug sellers. This is a huge breakthrough. Thank you to everybody who's worked on that. We saw how the Atlanta City Council voted, and yesterday the mayor signed an ordinance decriminalizing marijuana. Though remember that Georgia still prohibits it. But seriously, marijuana legalization is taking off like wildfire across this country. And we're starting to get it done right with Prop 64 in California last year, which provides for racial justice and reparation and expungement of records. And we're going to continue with that in New York, New Jersey, at the federal level in New Mexico and beyond. We are seeing harm reduction entering the mainstream. So many politicians across the country embracing access to naloxone, syringe exchange, good Samaritan laws, even supervised consumption facilities. Huge, huge change. We're seeing criminal justice reform take off across the country, bipartisan reforms, bail reform, asset forfeiture reform, sentencing reform. And the biggest shift of all, in my view, is the change in public opinion. The fact that today it's okay to talk about drug reform. It's mainstream almost. You have high profile allies like Jay-Z coming out and talking in our favor, politicians, intellectuals, so many people. You see a growing recognition that illicit drugs can be used to treat health conditions like MDMA, which can be used to treat PTSD. People are not just talking about marijuana either. People are talking about all drug decriminalization. It's okay to push for that. And all of these successes are thanks to the work, not only of DPA, but of everybody in this room. People like the way of life, organizations like a way of life in California, Dean Becker, and the Drug Truth Network in Houston, Texas. Vocal in New York. Our partner, the Ordinary People Society in Alabama led by Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, making it possible for drug war prisoners to vote in prison. Yet with all our gains, our work is today more pressing than ever. Soaring overdose rates, huge arrest records, killings from Mexico to the Philippines, these are major, major problems. Drug induced homicide prosecutions are going through the roof right now across the United States. Compounding the problem. We're increasingly hearing talk about involuntary commitment as a solution to the opioid overdose crisis. And now we have Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions. And when I look at them, I don't just see throwbacks to the 1980s. I see something much more vicious at work. Because in addition to all the other things that the war on drugs stands for, to me, it's very clear that the war on drugs is a tool for populists, for demagogues, for wannabe autocrats. I grew up under an autocrat. When I was 15, the president of the country I was living in, Peru, shut down Congress, shut down the courts. And he got people to support him by appealing to fear. By making people feel like only he could bring order back to the country after we had faced terrible violence. And people believed him and people went along. And I see the same efforts underway here. I see it in the way that Trump and Sessions talk about black and brown communities as hell holes. And the way they talk about bad hombres who are supposedly bringing addiction and misery and violence across the border. You can see it in Trump telling police not to be too nice to suspects and to take the hand away, don't protect their head. You can see it in the sudden appearance of a new FBI report that labels activists as black identity extremists. Just another way to stigmatize and criminalize communities of color. We know that this is not about protecting anybody's health. This is not about improving safety in this country. This is about finding excuses to go after communities that they don't like, communities of color, communities that are vulnerable and locking them up and deporting them. It's about giving red meat to their base, which includes those white supremacists that Trump has found it so difficult to criticize. It's about intimidating civil society, those who would stand up to him. And it's about distracting and confusing the public. And it has real consequences for real people. It has real consequences for low level drug sellers or couriers, not real drug kingpins, but people who are desperate, who will now be facing steep mandatory minimums in federal prison. It has real consequences for kids whose immigrant parents are now being sent away for decades old drug convictions, and who will now grow up without their father or mother or both. It has real consequences for black families who live with police presence in their communities justified by the war on drugs, and who have to sleep with the ever present fear that one of their own will be the next Philando Castile, the next Tamir Rice, the next Sandra Bland. It has real consequences for people who use drugs and have to do so in secret, and therefore are at greater risk for overdose. It has real consequences for our democracy, because it oppresses huge swaths of our society, and because it's built on a lie, the lie that if you just lock enough people up, you can stop overdoses, you can stop drug misuse. But standing here today, I also feel full of hope. Because I've seen elsewhere time and again, how even against the worst of odds, brave, committed people who insist on telling the truth and stand up for rights prevail. I've seen in my country Peru, how our former autocrat ended up himself tried for crimes against humanity. I've seen in Colombia, how journalists, investigators, activists who risked their lives ended up exposing some of the ugliest truths about their government. The US has its own history of so many movements for civil rights, for LGBT rights, for women's rights, partner movements that are still struggling to this day, that fight never ends, but who have yielded through tremendous effort, concrete gains for our society. And you, all of you here, are our heroes. You're our activists. And this is our struggle for truth and justice. And already thanks to your efforts, Americans know better than what their government is telling them. And I know that everyone here is going to keep telling the truth when officials lie, when they give us their alternative facts and claim that the war on drugs is the answer. We're the ones who will stand up and say no, the war on drugs is what got us here. And it has to end. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy. This could get much uglier than it already has. But that's why now, more than ever, I am so grateful to be in this room with all of you. Everyone here brings important experience, knowledge, expertise to the table. So in the next few days, please take the time to get to know each other, to forge new connections, to listen to people who work in an area that's different from yours, to strategize, to organize together. I know that if we work together with clarity of vision and understanding the challenges that lie ahead, but most importantly, moving from a place of strength and hope, we will not only build on our past successes, we are going to transform this country and the world into a place where compassion weighs more than stigma and cruelty, where truth and evidence weigh more than ignorance, freedom, more than oppression, life, more than callousness, and justice becomes a foundation for our society. Thank you, everybody.