Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My kids are really into social justice.
I have a hard time arguing with stupid people.
I am a drug expert and the father of 3 black males.
I grew up in the hood in Miami in a poor neighborhood.
Politicians move when the public requires them to move.
We need better public education and more realistic education.
Disregard belief systems that aren't based on empirical studies.
I am glad that people are trying to have a rational conversation about drugs.
It is always a good time when I visit the 'Melissa Harris Perry Show' on MSNBC.
If drugs are bad, any respectable society should do something to deal with them.
Researchers, treatment providers - we all have a stake in the drug hysteria game.
All children will do things that you may not want them to. That's part of parenting.
I'm the only tenured black faculty in the sciences at Columbia, in the middle of Harlem.
One of the things we know about people is that people are not very courageous in general.
The listening community has the obligation of distinguishing informed opinion from tweets.
Perhaps, for once, we should try interventions that are informed by science and proven to work.
It is my mission to put sensible and evidence-based information above politics and exaggeration.
We should decriminalize all drugs. The assumptions on which our drug policies are based are flawed.
When patients reject official advice and proved medicine, they become more susceptible to quackery.
If we were going to look at how pharmalogical drugs influence crime, we should probably look at alcohol.
In the hood, you have a problem with somebody, you have to deal with it. The outcome is pretty immediate.
The notion that scientists are dispassionate - first of all, that's wrong. Scientists are extremely passionate.
If politicians did care about their constituents, they would work harder to seek out people like me. They don't.
Most of the stuff that parades as drug education in this country is just rubbish with no foundation in evidence.
I went into the military because I didn't get a scholarship, a basketball scholarship I thought that I would get.
High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society.
I had to go to England to really learn about American racism in a way that corroborated my reality. That was critical.
Writing in a nuanced way, getting at all the details in a way that remains interesting for the reader, is very difficult.
I strongly discourage any intellectuals, regardless of race, from speaking on matters for which they have limited or no expertise.
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.
If you are funding researchers to look primarily for pathology, not surprisingly, that is what they are going to find and report on.
I am committed to the people who are sick and tired of seeing their tax dollars being used to fund unethical people and corporations.
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.
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 had a grandmother who was really strong, who doted on me, who wanted to make sure that I didn't go off the beaten path, although I did.
I did most of my Ph.D. in Washington. They used to bring black kids through the lab for tours, and I was one of the few black researchers.
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.
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.
Teaching university students affords me the opportunity to demonstrate to young adults that they don't have to be perfect to make contributions to their country.
Skills that are employable or marketable, education, having a stake or meaningful role in society, not being marginalized - all of those things are very important.
When we make decisions based on factors other than the available empirical evidence, we are less than objective, which means we are no longer acting as scientists.
The strange proposition that black intellectuals - regardless of their training - are 'race experts' mainly because they are black is naive and potentially dangerous.
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.
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.
You have to be open-minded, and you have to be critical, and you have to let go of your predispositions about what you've been told that doesn't have foundations in evidence.
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.
The way we have been thinking about brain science is that people show you pretty pictures, pretty images, and you think that that tells you something about how they behave. It doesn't.
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.
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.
My research has taught me many important lessons, but perhaps none more important than this: drug effects, like semesters, are predictable; police interactions with black people are not.