I feel very lucky to be successful in what i love doing everyday.
Writing in a nuanced way, getting at all the details in a way that remains interesting for the reader, is very difficult.
We should decriminalize all drugs. The assumptions on which our drug policies are based are flawed.
One of the things that has happened is that our drug laws have been institutionalized now. If you want to say that somebody's a bad person in a movie or in a television show or something about that, you say they sell drugs or they use drugs.
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.
The policy that received more attention particularly in the past decade and a half or so has been the US cocaine policy, the differential treatment of crack versus powder cocaine and question is how my research impacted my view on policy. Clearly that policy is not based on the weight of the scientific evidence. That is when the policy was implemented, the concern about crack cocaine was so great that something had to be done and congress acted in the only way they knew how, they passed policy and that's what a responsible society should do.
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.
Reason bases its decisions on evidence available to everyone, and allows people to disagree when evidence is lacking. Religion will never do that.
There ought to be such an atmosphere in every Christian church that a man going there and sitting two hours should take the contagion of heaven, and carry home a fire to kindle the altar whence he came.
Will be a divine fight, a holy war. . . Armageddon on a miniature scale.
Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence