This also pertains to the present discussion on marijuana and prevention. If Mr. Sessions is right, that those policies of telling people that drugs are bad and not to use them at any age work, why does the United States have five or 10 times as much heroin use as it did 10 years ago? In other words, the current situation more than amply demonstrates the failure of that kind of approach.
The reason people use drugs—and I indicated that to some degree with marijuana.... If you ask young people what they get from it, they'll tell you what they get from it. They'll get a sense of social connection. They'll get a calming of their minds. For certain conditions like ADHD, it actually has a soothing effect that they crave. Heroin is a painkiller. It soothes emotional and physical pain. Stimulants make people feel more alive, more present, more vivacious, and more vital.
The real question is, why is it that people have emotional pain? Why are so many young people anxious? Why are so many young people depressed? Why are these numbers going up and up and up? Why are more and more kids diagnosed with ADHD, which itself is a risk factor for addictions of all kinds, particularly a marijuana addiction?
Those answers are not to be found in individual people; they are to be found in social factors. When I'm talking about prevention, our prevention approaches really have to address those social factors: what's happening in the schools, what's happening in the homes, and what's happening in the culture.
I know that this legislation can't address those questions in any comprehensive or even deep way, but I certainly concur with all my colleagues who said that this should be a public, monopoly-based system. I also concur with everything they said about how the money being made from it should not go into funding highways or anything else. It should go into funding programs that help prevent the social conditions and the social pressures that drive young people into drug use. In other words, if we're going to have a monopoly here, let's use the income from that to actually address the real issues as to why kids are using drugs.
Finally I'll say—and I've written about this in one of my books—that the problem with exhorting kids not to do stuff is, one more time, that the kids who are listening to adults are at much less risk, and the kids who are at high risk are not listening to adults because of what's happened in their lives.
Our prevention approaches need to go beyond telling kids not to use stuff. They also have to go to bringing these kids into a healthy relationship with adults so that they will listen to us. That's a big issue.