 You know, it's probably important to note in this space how important that quote is and what James Baldwin was saying, Jason's grandparents came to this country picking cotton, Jason's grandparents did too. The next person I'm going to introduce before we hear from our new executive director is a woman who has been a mentor to so many of us in this movement and at times when she might have thought about slowing down, it seems as though she just revs it up. This is another person who knows that when you're going to change the world, you do too have to be ready at midnight or at noon, long before I knew who DPA was, I knew who Deborah Small was, because she raised the specter of what was happening in Tulia, Texas. She called us into the streets to end the Rockefeller drug wars. I remember standing in small rooms waiting to see what the governor would do and there was this one tiny woman in the corner with a big ass voice and she was saying, free him all. This is not going to happen on my watch and she has continued to say that every single day that I've known her for the past two decades, welcome Ms. Deborah Small. Greetings family. I think it's time for us to like go beyond calling ourselves an alliance and acknowledge that we're family. When I come into this space, I see so many people that I've grown up with in this movement and it's just wonderful. I'm going to be quick because I don't want to give Asha any reason to give me the hook. I got three points that I want to make about this conference. For people who know me, they know that I am the ultimate documentary geek. You want to know about any film that has to do with history or whatever, ask me. Well, before I came here, I watched the Ken Burns series on the Vietnam War and there were a couple of things about it that for me were really important. One was the fact that Bill Zimmerman, who worked on developing the ads for everyone of our major initiative, I knew that he had been an activist, but I had no idea how much he had been involved in being an activist against the Vietnam War. And so it was wonderful for me to see the connection between the activism that he engaged in in the 60s and the way that he helped us to develop messages to help move the movement forward in the 90s and 2000s. There was that. Second is that it made me think about how we continue to repeat history. How the same way that we went into the Vietnam War based on a lie that we developed all the wrong metrics for success and stayed because we couldn't admit failure are all the things that are true about the drug war. We went into it based on a lie. We have all the wrong metrics for success. And we're in it still even though everyone believes it doesn't work because we're afraid to admit that it's a failure. But the most important thing about it is that who we are in that story is the anti-war movement. Where the people who very early on before the rest of the country was willing to acknowledge what was true, went out into the streets and said to people, this is wrong. Where the ones who long before other people noticed it, looked at all the dead bodies and said, this is wrong. We are the ones who very early on looked at all the money that was being wasted and said this is wrong. And so I think it's important for us to remember that back then, the country didn't want to hear what people had to say. They were unpopular when young people were getting shot on campus. 53% of Americans thought that that was okay, that they brought it on themselves. So we have to remember when people condemn us, when they castigate us, when they say that we're not real Americans, that we're not the real patriots, that in the same way that we understand now that the anti-war activists were on the right side of history, so are we. History is watching us. We're on the right side. I have two more quick things I want to say. One is that this space, this conference, has always been a place for learning. It's always been a place for us to come and grow and actually challenge our own thinking. We challenge our own concepts, so I want to put forward some challenges to you all about us thinking about this being a time for us to look at the language that we use. I think that there are some terms that need to be buried. I call them the tyranny of dead concepts. The first one is clean versus dirty, when we're talking about urine. Every time we say it, we're speaking and undermining the very mission and values that we're here putting forward. Second term, drug users versus drug sellers. That is a distinction without meaning, one that we need to bury. And I am channeling my brother Eddie Ellis when I say that we need to bury that terminology and use the term people involved with drugs, people involved with drugs. And then the final and two more, nonviolent versus violent. Every time we do that, we are stabbing our critical resistance brothers in the back. Every time we say that, we're saying it's okay to throw away some people in order to save us. That's not who we are. And the final thing is to bury the term nonprofit. That's not who we are either. We are people who generate social profit. We create all the things that make life worth living, better health, better housing, better relationships, more love. So within the frame of for-profit, non-profit, bury that, we produce social profit. And then the final thing that I want to speak about is women's leadership. 10 years ago at the conference in New Orleans, many of the women there, myself included, got together and we had a protest against the conference. We passed around these little slips of paper that said, one out of 10 is this progress because there was so few women on the program. Forget having a plenary. There was so few women on the program period. So when I went through this year and saw that not only did we have a women's plenary, but that women showed up in the space this year, in every session, in the biggest way, not as experts on women, but as experts on everything. As experts on everything. And so when we had the women's plenary and people said, well, you know, is it gonna be a wonderful new movement because we've got women leading it? I'm like, I don't know about that, but I know it's gonna be a wonderful movement because we got Monique and Maria leading it. And so I want to leave you with what Michelle said and flip it around. She said, go big or go home. I say, let's go home and go big.