Of course, we would love to see no drugs in the prisons, including many of the legal drugs that are pumped into prisoners. I think we should take a lesson from what some of the schools have done. They recognize that when you have drugs in a community, they're likely to be introduced. As a mother of two kids, I'd love to see no drugs in the schools. Instead we talk about universal education, harm reduction programs, other avenues, other things for kids to do, and other ways to engage individuals. It's not a great leap to realize that these individuals have already been marginalized, have already been drop-kicked out of those systems. We need to think strategically about how to engage them, if we want them to come back into the community, as eventually most of them will, in ways that are productive and pose no threat to the rest of us.
On October 4th, 2011. See this statement in context.