 As we come to our final speaker this morning, there's a whole lot of agita to take a deep breath about what I would say to introduce him. I could easily have talked about a man who left Princeton 21 years ago so that he could begin to build a movement that has all of you in this room today. I could have talked about a man who pulled together the highly placed and the humble so that in 2000 the single largest at that time criminal justice reform, Proposition 36, would be passed. I could have talked about all the people he brought together so in New York so the Rockefeller drug laws were finally in at long last dismantles. I could have talked about a man who helped bring together the resources so that Proposition 47 passed in California, but instead I want to talk about a man who stood by my side in my darkest moments. I want to talk about a man I've watched, allow me to homeschool my daughter from the office when she was being brutalized in her school and he found a way to let her be there so I could continue to work and support her. My deepest depression, when he could have had legitimate reasons to fire me, he held me closer. He took care of me with the constructive care of a father and a friend in the very same way he raised his own beautiful daughter Lila in. The same way that he does with this movement is with an abundance of emotion and even more pride that I ask you to welcome. My friend, my colleague, my beloved Dr. Ethan Nadelman. Damn, Asha. You know how to welcome a guy. You have no idea how beautiful you all look from up here. I can't believe it. I cannot believe it. There's never been a gathering like this to try to end the war on drugs. Never a group this big, this dynamic, this incredible. And I have to correct just one thing that Asha said earlier. She said there were people not just from most of the states in this country but from 31 countries. There's people here from 71 countries. That has not happened either. So, you know, I think some of you who know me well know I never know what I'm going to say until the words come out of my mouth. And I really just think that this, I need to just start with a few moments of reflection about where we've been, where we are, and where we're going and about the issues that we're confronting as we evolve from a nascent fringe movement into one that increasingly has something that many of us are unfamiliar with. And that's power. That's power. That itself presents its own sets of challenges as we grow. As I look at the history of other movements, the ones that came before us and that still persist and grow for gay rights and civil rights and women's rights and other movements for freedom and social justice, I know the challenges that they have faced as well. The inevitable tendencies to begin to break apart and to be consumed by internal tensions and all of the things that come. And the question I keep asking is how long we know we are already manifesting that, but I know that we can keep going further and bigger and better because only by continuing to build out what unites us, even as we expand into other realms, will we actually ultimately accomplish our objectives. Last week I went to see a movie called Trumbo. It was about a guy, a screenwriter, who was blacklisted during the 1950s. It was about the era of McCarthyism. One of the things I realized is that when I say the era of McCarthyism, many of you don't even know what I'm talking about. And I'm not just talking about those of you from outside the United States, but to sum it up in just a couple of sentences, McCarthyism was that horrific period in America predominantly during the 1950s. When we come out of World War II with all the elation and celebration, and all of a sudden we found ourselves in this cold war and fears of communism, of what Russia might do to America and of communist spies, were everywhere. And during that time, people like a senator named Joe McCarthy and lots of others like him, they played on people's fears. They created blacklists and they terrorized people. They destroyed lives and careers and families, did horrific things. Some people went to prison. People were silenced and censored, dragged up before congressional committees, described as un-American by a committee on un-American activities. And one of the most horrible things about it all was that the vast majority of Americans went along. They went along. And one of the things that saddens me today is that even as the Americans in the 1960s and after that began to repudiate that history of McCarthyism, that there was some lacking of accountability, there was some failure to call it a talent and some failure to ensure that future generations knew about McCarthyism and about other periods of McCarthyist-like activity in our past so that we could learn and remember and know something of what might lie ahead or of the injustices of which we fight, that they were grounded in something else. Well, that's when I was sitting there watching that movie and just thinking about the war on drugs and where we lie now because, you know, what happened in the late 1980s and the 1990s, you know, for that matter, under Nixon's 70s, but truly in the 80s and the 90s and into the first decade of this century, was something like McCarthyism on steroids. Right? It resembled McCarthyism in that it played on real fears of the American people, fears about drugs coming into our country, fears about junkies and drug addicts and drug dealers and all sorts of things. It played on that. But what it also shared in common was the fact that almost everybody went along. Almost everybody went along. Not just white people but black people and brown people, leaders and followers, people around the world. It became almost the great global consensus where America and Cuba and Libya and Russia could all agree on something, which was that we needed a global war on drugs no matter the costs or the consequences. And what pains me about today is that we barely know our history and that there has been no accountability, that the Joe McCarthy's of the drug war still stand strong and people get on in our societies and have not been called out. And so I've been thinking about the challenge. This has been a lot of my mind of late. The challenge of a political movement as we are entering what might best be described as our second generation. Where some of you here were here in the old days of the Drug Policy Foundation where we met almost every year, some 300 or 400 of us, maybe a group that could fit in this part of the room right here. And where we were in the midst of a horrific war on drugs and a small number of people standing up and saying something was wrong. And then I think about those of you who are younger than my daughter. Those of you who are still in college or younger or just a few years older. Those of you who were born after the war on drugs was declared in the late 1980s. Those of you who don't know who William Bennett was. You laugh. But many of you have never heard that name until it just came out of my mouth. And the thing is that what I began thinking about was the challenges of each generation. That on the one hand, here is this generation of people my age and a little older and younger who go back and go back and know this history. And we have the benefit of knowing this history. We have the benefit of the wisdom acquired in years and decades of struggling for justice. We know that of which we came from. We know how horrific this would be. And when we see the little victories of today, we know how to embrace and appreciate what has actually been accomplished. But I also know that there's downsides that come with all having been in this for so many decades. It's the sense in which we were so accustomed to the horrific history that sometimes we begin to lose sight of what the vision could be for a radically different world. It's sometimes we begin to lack faith in the capacity for change. It's sometimes that some of us become afraid of victory. It's that existential struggle when you fight all your life to end an injustice and then injustice begins to end and you begin to ask yourself if that injustice I fought all my life against is ending, what is the rest of my life about? And do I actually like what it is that I've created? And we see that happening in the marijuana reform today. We sure do. What a struggle it is. And I live that struggle inside myself every single day. Every single day. My God, we're winning. We're winning. Oh, my God. Four stays down. Majority of the public. We're right behind the gay rights movement in achieving victory. Oh, my God. And then, oh, my God. Those guys in Ohio, if you'd want it, it would have lit up American politics and if you'd want it, oh, my God. A constitutionally mandated oligopoly for the agricultural product that every American should be free to grow. I don't know. And then I think about the younger generation. And I get angry sometimes. I say, learn your damn history. Learn your damn history. But then I realize, wait a second, it's my obligation and all of you older generation to teach that history, right? And to reflect on that history, not just as old funny dud, he's talking about how bad the old days were, but really to convey that. Because right here in this room, we are the history and we are the future of this movement. It is by us informing one another because what do the young bring? They bring energy and they bring passion and they bring new ways of looking. They are unburdened by the constraints and whatever happened before. They can see what lies ahead. And I give all my wisdom of an elder can say, well, yeah, you think that's going that way, but let me tell you what's going to happen because I've seen this before. Odds are, I'm going to be right more times than not. But the fact of the matter is that when I'm wrong and they're right, that's where the real progress begins to happen. It's understanding the new things that can happen to end this, the new directions. Now, it's all of these dialectics that's on my mind. The dialectic between old and young is just one of them and how we maintain an increasingly multi-generational campaign and a movement to end the war on drugs to the point where actually, you know, we actually have a debate. Should we even be attacking the war on drugs anymore? Because we're at a point where the vast majority of Americans and most other people believe the war on drugs has failed. Then when we're beginning, you know, for 20 years, Drug Policy Alliance has said end the war on drugs and now we're saying, do we need a new phrase? Do we need to talk about ending drug prohibition? Do we need to talk about ending punitive prohibition? Do we need to keep our language evolving? But one of the other things I think about is the dialectical relationship between drug policy reform as a movement in and of itself seeking to infuse others and all the other movements for freedom and social justice that are out there and that weave together and intermingle with ours. It is about on the one hand retaining, embracing, building out our uniqueness as drug policy reformers while keeping our minds and our hearts and everything open to the opportunities to be part and to meld with other movements. That itself is its own challenge. You know, what did this movement grow out of? It grew out of the horrific period in the late 80s and early 90s when this massive war on drugs was declared. It grew out of a period when millions of Americans were being terrorized and demonized. It came out of a period when the First Lady of the United States said that the casual marijuana user was the most dangerous person in America. It grew out of a period when all of a sudden Jim Crow was being replaced by a massive, massive attack on people of color in this country. It came at a time when people, a new generation growing up in the 80s that was actually embracing some of this stuff where a sense that the young would set us free in the future was actually when the 80s replaced the 70s and the 60s, the period of rebellion, the 70s of live and let live was replaced by the 80s, the generation of conformity and all of a sudden our hopes that youth could lead something were dashed. We emerged that the realization that was happening with the war on drugs was fundamentally wrong. We emerged out of the notion that treating and punishing a human being whose only offense was to possess, use, grow, sell, buy some forbidden substance, that that person was morally and criminally equivalent to a human being who took somebody's life, who raped, who performed horrible acts. That's what was said in those days. We grew out of the notion and the principle that nobody but nobody deserves to be punished or discriminated against or amongst, based solely upon what we put into our bodies so long as we do no harm to others. We grew out of that notion, that fundamental human rights, civil libertarian, human rights, civil rights, human rights notion about sovereignty of our own mind and body and what happens when you begin to act as if human beings who have done no harm to others deserve to lose their freedom for days, weeks, months, years or decades. We grew out of that, a sense of our fundamental uniqueness. It was our consciousness of the stigma attached to human beings who use those drugs instead of those drugs, that that stigma was not justified. It grew out of the notion of people being deprived of their access to the medications they needed because taking that medication by definition made you an addict. It grew out of the understanding that what American foreign policy was doing to the rest of the world in projecting our abysmal, paranoid drug war unto the rest of the world was fundamentally wrong and something for which we as Americans needed to apologize to the rest of the world. And it grew also out of remarkable partnership between left, right and center. A movement at which base and passion came so much from the left part of the American political spectrum and the similar ones outside, but we're conservatives like William Buckley and Milton Friedman and George Schultz and others were every bit as passionate about ending this war on drugs for their own conservative and libertarian reasons. We were to some extent and are remaining to some extent unique. Those of us who came from the left knew there was something fundamentally wrong about the excesses of the dynamism of American capitalism and the ways that people were left behind. But we also had a unique viewpoint that brought us together with people on the right because we had and we still have an upfront seat to precisely how venal government can be in some areas of life. It didn't take American capitalism to produce the war on drugs. It took politicians playing on fear and the interests of prison-hard unions and private corporations but fundamentally driven by fear and political self-interest. We saw how bad government can be. And we made our alliances because those of us on the right also understood that there was something fundamentally wrong. Something fundamentally wrong with depriving people of their basic freedoms of wasting government resources, of building mass incarceration that that too was wrong. And what unites left, right and center in this drug policy reform movement I think it's that we care about freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Drug policy reform is many things but it is foremost a movement for liberty and freedom. Freedom from oppression, freedom from fear, freedom from incarceration, freedom from racism, freedom. That's what we need to keep in mind that that core element of freedom is absolutely pivotal to who we are. It is what unites us with all the other human rights movements that have gone before us and the ones of which we are increasingly becoming a part. Yet at the same time opportunities are presenting themselves to join with other movements, to become part of other movements. The movements now what's going on with race in this country and to some extent some others, I mean, that is us and that will be us. That is us and that will be us. I mean, look, we all know the fact of the matter is there are millions and millions of white people in this country and around the world who have been victimized, destroyed, killed, maceated and diseased by this war on drugs. There is no monopoly on victimization by non-white people in this country or anywhere else and we must always remember that, that this has been to some extent not an equal opportunity but a universal victimization. Yet at the same time, at the same time, we also know that this war on drugs is overwhelmingly and disproportionately a war on people of color in this country and around the world. We know that to be the case. We know that when you look historically, when you look historically at why some drugs are legal and others not, it has almost nothing to do with the relative risks or dangers of drugs and almost everything to do with who used or who was perceived to use particular drugs. We know that the origins of opiate prohibition were about demonization and terrorization of Chinese people in this country. That the origins of the cocaine prohibition laws were about targeting blacks. That the origins of the marijuana laws were about targeting Mexican Americans and Mexican migrants. We know that there is no way we could have mass incarceration in America today if most of the people being incarcerated were white people, not people of color. We know all that to be true. And we also know that just as America's experience with racism and with slavery is exceptional compared to all of the societies, that the fact of racism and the drug war, racism manifesting through the drug war occurs all around the world. Look at the situation of black people in England and black people in Brazil. Look at how we had the criminalization of coca and the demonization of the Indians in Latin America. Look at the ethnic and racial minorities in Asia who are being terrorized and demonized in this way as well. Racism is not our unique American experience even though it is unique in its own ways here, but it is a global phenomenon and it is the one in which the drug war is interwoven and played on that to do immense harm. This is a global struggle for freedom and equality. Yes, we are a human rights matter which means that all lives matter. But black lives matter, black lives matter. Black lives matter and the way it connects to drug policy reform is that the war on drugs was what gave legitimacy and energy and resources to the mass incarceration of black and brown people in this country. It was the policy that legitimized the placing on of hands and the placing on of handcuffs onto black and brown bodies in this country. The association that because your skin was that darker shade rather than that shade, you fell into a special category in America and for that matter in other countries as well. But here I'm talking about in America that you could be deprived of the basic rights and freedoms and decencies and dignities. That that's where when we do this town hall tonight about drug policy reform and black lives matter, understand that this is a merging of a movement, a merging of two civil rights movements, a movement for drug policy reform and the new civil rights movement coming together and owning one another, owning one another. And then there's that other dialectic. The dialectic between what it means to be a movement driven by a vision and a movement that day in day fights for the incremental little victories that we can accomplish. And you know something? We're getting more and more of those incremental victories. And they're making more and more of a difference. How many years ago was it when all of us are non-led to campaign for ban the box and now we see the White House and big corporations owning that? How many years ago was it when people didn't know what it was or how to spell the word in the lock zone to reduce over those fatalities? And now we've got Chicago Recovery Alliance, Moms United, everybody else, and the drugs are talking our language. How many years ago was it when we were just trying to eke out one little victory for medical marijuana and now half of America's got legal medical marijuana, dozens of other countries got legal medical marijuana, and we're talking about ending marijuana prohibition entirely? How many years ago when we couldn't even imagine that the government would ever fund a study on psychedelics or that ayahuasca would begin to become a household word? But thanks to the efforts of maps and others, I mean where we are moving forward in a whole new way on that front. How many years was it when the politicians were afraid to say anything other than more drug war and more lock them up and right now in almost every state in the country we are seeing some of those laws being rolled back and people let free? How many years ago was it when the bail bond industry reigned supreme and finally they're suffering some defeats? How many years was it when the private prison corporations got away scot free and now they are on the defensive as are the prison guards unions, right? And looking around the world there's all sorts of places from Uruguay with its cannabis policies to Columbia adding its fumigation of coca to all the other ways in which people are being let out of prison throughout Latin America to the rollback of some of the forced incarceration of people for drug use and drug addiction in Asian countries. We are making progress. We are making progress. But here's the thing again. The further we go, the more opportunity there is both to lose sight of that common vision to become seized by something else to forget what it is we're fighting for to know how to remind and guide our allies to do the right thing. You know, when some of our allies a couple decades ago embraced drug courts, drug courts is the answer. And God knows there are some drug court judges out there doing the Lord's work and for those of you from outside the U.S. you need to understand that drug and drug courts are quite different from your far more humane drug courts in other countries especially in Europe and Canada. But you know something so often drug courts which might provide a benefit to a small number of people as they became the systemic approach for alternatives to incarceration did more harm than good. They ended up being two steps forward and three steps back. It's an understanding of the potential for two steps forward and three steps back that we need to watch out for. That we need to keep our eye on that broader vision. And it's the dialectic too in dealing with new allies. How strange it was for me and my colleagues the other day to go by and pay a visit to folks working in the drug czar's office. And I said to those guys, you know there's still issues, I know there's space between us when it comes to legalizing Maryland and those European cutting edge approaches like heroin maintenance and safe injection and the decriminalization of all drug possession. But my God, on a whole host of areas like access to methadone, maintenance of buprenorphine like the way the drug court should properly be acting like stopping HIV and supporting needle exchange programs like good Samaritan laws and locks on access to reduce overdose fatalities that they need to roll that matter. And I said to them, do you realize this? You guys now sound more like we do than you sound like any of your predecessors for the last 23 years. And that means that now there's the opportunity to work increasingly with people in government even as we need to keep them honest, to work with the people who exist in power without allowing ourselves to be co-opted. I like to study the most powerful political players because we're not there yet but what do they do? They work with people in government and on Monday they hold hands they kiss and express their affection and they fight together for something and on Wednesday they take it out on those bastards for screwing them on something else. That's what it means to become a movement with power to work with people. Law enforcement law enforcement has been my enemy for a very long time at bail bonds industry those prosecutors the cops locking up people the DA's associations lying their asses off all those people just patting their paychecks with overtime I mean just horrific stuff I mean a truly venal force in America and you know something they are still such a fundamental problem defending their own self-interest by putting more and more people into the thumb of the criminal justice system in this country and so many others right? So we are going after them and we are targeting them and to move forward on asset forfeiture reform to make sure that law enforcement agencies can no longer seize our property without a criminal conviction and keep it for their own benefits that is emerging and re-emerging as a growing priority for drug policy alliance and this growing movement but at the same time something changing in law enforcement in America I'll tell you that something changing and we have some very brave and wonderful law enforcement officers in this audience with us today right? A few months ago drug policy alliance was involved in organizing a meeting on something called LEAD LEAD Law enforcement assisted diversion an amazing diversion program that when police stop people with drugs instead of arresting them they provide them and turn them over to services first a much more European style approach pioneered in Seattle, rolled out then in Santa Fe now embraced by Albany and in that audience for the first time in my life I found myself speaking to hundreds of people coming from law enforcement all around the country for the first time myself I found myself at a meeting where the White House was asking to co-partner with us on a new innovation and what I realized was that law enforcement even as marijuana legalization presents them with an existential dilemma because what are they going to do all about that law enforcement goes we want naloxone we want to have a different way more and more people begin to step up in that way you know what I see an envision for the future there it's when all the wonderful people at LEAD and all the growing number of people in LEAD and when LEAP and LEED you can barely tell them apart where that one letter just doesn't make all that much difference because the brave warriors in LEAP who have fought for ending drug prohibition and the people in LEED working inside the system understand that we are all part of the same struggle all part of the same struggle so history the future we must never forget we must never forget the millions who have suffered and even lost their lives because of the war on drugs we must never forget the millions in this country and millions elsewhere who have lost their freedom because of their involvement with a certain set of drugs rather than one other we must never forget that people have died unnecessarily of HIV and hep C and overdose because governments fail to treat these issues as health issues rather than criminal issues we must never forget the hundreds of thousands dead in Mexico and Latin America and Asia as a result of the absurd crazy drug wars propagated and pushed by my government among all others for all the wrong reasons we must never forget all the farmers and peasants were all over who have had their livelihoods destroyed because the plant they were growing was one of those forbidden products we must never forget the people in law enforcement who lost their lives and struggled against drug traffickers who didn't need to die and didn't need to be fighting that battle we must never forget the people who fought for freedom and just died of the exhaustion of being part of this growing movement we must never forget any of that and we must hold accountable some of those people who justified and legitimized and stood by and stood on the sidelines while all of that happened while all of that happened and for those of you who don't know you younger generation William Bennett was America's first drug czar appointed by the first president George Bush in 1989 he was in some steps the intellectual architect and chief protagonist of the drug war at its most venal times he was the one boldly calling for the death penalty now the punitive measures and giving on the slightest nod to the value of treatment and all of this stuff and he's still out there today often times saying the same things when I think about the modern day analogies the drug war analogies to the Joe McCarthy's of the 50's I think about William Bennett and then I think back at that visit I had even before at Star Linda Smith center in 1994 and I went and a bunch of people said Ethan you should go pay a visit to Ram Dass there used to be Richard Alpert but a wise man, a wise man Ram Dass and I went to see Ram Dass and I told him I had this billionaire George Soros just gonna help turn some of these ideas into action and did he have any advice and thinking about creating an organization and he basically said I'm gonna tell you two things the first one he said was you need to let go of your attachment to the things you're fighting for I said what? he said you gotta let go of your attachment to the things for which you're fighting and I thought about that and reflected on that and what I realized was what he was telling me was win or lose this struggle was worth fighting for whether this victory happens in my life or beyond this struggle is worth fighting for that we are fighting for the right thing for wisdom and righteousness and justice and human rights and whether we win or lose it's the right thing that we're doing I'll tell you this though of course I like that we're winning sorta we're making progress that's for sure and winning is a lot sweeter but in a way I think we're more likely to win when we embrace that message but then the second thing he said to me he said Ethan you need to learn to love William Bennett you're kidding me right he said Ethan you need to learn to love William Bennett and I had to reflect on that one as well reflect hard and deep but I know what he means because on some level even if I may never learn or grow enough to love that man I know that the fears and the views that he represented that that is what drove the war on drugs I know that fundamentally the war on drugs was driven above all by fear by people's fears around their children and drugs, by people's fears around crime, by people's fears around white people's fears around black and brown people and the way that those could be mixed in with drugs by people's older people's fears around young people and lack all of these fears is what he played on and I know that we cannot win unless we find the way to embrace and own what those fears are about we may be more enlightened we may understand these things better but until we understand and own and embrace those fears until we can find the way to hold the hands of those people who are most afraid of what we stand for and find the way for them to embrace our hands we cannot ultimately win we have moved forward on marijuana reform in a way that is truly revolutionary I have to tell you all my life have traveled around the world and giving speeches and start off by apologizing as an American for the harms inflicted by my country, by my government around the world, but now when I travel around I can also say I am proud to be an American because we are leading the world when it comes to sensible reforms of marijuana policies we are leading the world and we in America are proud of that fact we encourage all of you around the world to do the same and to pursue your own models there's nobody saying that you have to embrace the dynamic capitalist model of legalization which will probably inevitably happen in this country we're looking to those of you in Europe to find a different way to do this we're looking to the pioneers to Canada to jump to the fore again and find other ways but what we did succeed in marijuana is transcending that fear level to the point where the ordinary American parent could say you know something I know enough about this phenomena that I am more afraid of what the war on marijuana may do to my child than I am about marijuana itself but we got to do that with the other drugs too and with everything else as well because fear is what lies ahead when all of a sudden we see fears of crime rising again, attention in Baltimore with rising murder rates the growing fear of crime, the ways in which television can play in those fears in politicians when we see our very allies in the legislatures and city councils who agree with us on legalizing marijuana and rolling back mandatory minimums and then a new drug, a new synthetic drug like this and new that the first thing they want to do is to criminalize first and ask questions later we know that they too even our most liberal and progressive allies are afraid so it is by understanding we may be driven by anger by anger with the war on drugs has done in our society and around the world but at the same time until we learn until we can find in our hearts and our minds the ability to love those people who fear grows out of fear in the same way that we see happening today in response to what happened in Paris somehow we need to get there because that's how we will win now have we won? no, of course not are we there even on marijuana? no four states down, 46 to go one country down, 199 to go we have not won have we won on changing the prison population well we got from what people behind bars in America to 450,000 no, we have not won will ending the war on drugs solve the problems of mass incarceration in America? no, it will not because part of our obligation as a drug policy reform movement is to look for the ways in which we can create greater freedom and justice for those incarcerated not just for drug offenses but for the whole range of other offenses where what we bring to this can help enlighten we will win when there is no more war on drugs we will win when the principle that nobody but nobody deserves to be punished simply for what we put into our body's apps and harm to others is embraced in this society in our constitution by our supreme court, by our congress and the same thing in as many countries as possible around the world we will win when common sense and compassion and respect for the human rights even of the most stigmatized to people who use drugs is what becomes the norm we will win when the values for which we fight permeate the rest of society we are the movement for freedom and justice we are the people who love drugs the people who hate drugs and the people who don't give a damn about drugs but every one of us know that the war on drugs is not the right way to do this we are the new human rights movement we will walk in America and around the world and I'll tell you something when we come back together and get in Atlanta two years from now we are going to have double the number of victories under our belt the world is going to be changing and we are going to lead this moment in a way that is going to make history thank you very much thank you thank you thank you everybody have a wonderful three days ahead live and learn