One of the things we know about people is that people are not very courageous in general.

It is my mission to put sensible and evidence-based information above politics and exaggeration.

When patients reject official advice and proved medicine, they become more susceptible to quackery.

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.

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.

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

I'm the only tenured black faculty in the sciences at Columbia, in the middle of Harlem.

I went to college in the Air Force, and I went to college at the University of Maryland, who had college campuses on Air Force bases.

Too often, ill-informed rhetoric has led to emotional hysteria that obfuscates solid evidence regarding the real problems faced by poor people and, in overwhelmingly great proportions, by black people.

My kids are really into social justice.

Dopamine makes up less than one percent of the brain's neurotransmitters. It's a small portion. Dopamine is released when people are happy, angry, stressed. So it's really hard to call this specific neurotransmitter the pleasure neurotransmitter.

If we stay focused on data and the real issues, we can tailor our inventions to enhance public health and safety while decreasing the likelihood of racial discrimination.

The notion that scientists are dispassionate -- first of all, that's wrong. Scientists are extremely passionate.

I am a drug expert and the father of 3 black males.

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

I have a hard time arguing with stupid people.

Drug reformers get seduced by politicians who co-opt our language but who make no meaningful change. And when we don't hold politicians accountable, we contribute to harm.

Sleep is probably the most important biological function. If you don't get enough sleep, you can get psychiatric illnesses and all types of different illnesses.

It turns out that the term 'diversity' can be anything from black faculty to military veterans. Well, I am both, but have yet to be subjected to discrimination because I'm a veteran.

If you are funding researchers to look primarily for pathology, not surprisingly, that is what they are going to find and report on.