When you have the national narrative being crack is awful and black people are using it, why go against that narrative when you want to get that publication in The New York Times or wherever? It encourages people to play right into it.

Your decision to place your law enforcement resources in these communities is racism, but nobody has called people out on this. The law itself is not racist. But people's decision about where we're going to place our efforts, who we're going to prosecute, who we're not going to prosecute, is racism. And nobody's calling them on it.

We should decriminalize all drugs. The assumptions on which our drug policies are based are flawed.

If you're a member of a despised group, look out! They'll find a drug and associate you with its use. There are a lot of people in the gay community using methamphetamine and paying taxes and going to work and doing well.

The way we're currently educating people about heroin is to say that heroin is so awful. Heroin is not so much the problem. It's when you combine it. It's hard to die from heroin alone.

I've had investigations of my lab because people didn't like what I had to say. And when you have investigations and you're doing research, you're shut down for a while. You have to start all over again. So that's one area where I paid a high price.

I think about my cocaine use. I liked it. I thought it was a great drug. But I knew that if I was doing that almost exclusively, I wouldn't be able to continue to also have significant others and a wide range of other things. And I wasn't special. A number of people, including the people I was doing cocaine with, also behaved the same way.

We need to continuously put pressure on politicians to do more, because they are happy just to do nothing—it’s easier to do nothing.

Our ability to study the brain has been limited because of our tools and our tools have only allowed us to look at one neurotransmitter and we haven't looked so much into co-localization and co-release of transmitters. Our thinking is hampered by our tools.

People rarely die from heroin alone, it's the combination that's deadly. Maybe we should blast that out as a public health education message. That way at least we're keeping people safe.

High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society.

My critique of how we deal with drugs in society is just that - that we use these anecdotes to apply to everyone and the anecdotes are not representative.

I don't want to be on the bandwagon of dogging any president or anybody in positions where they have all these different constituencies.