what drives me is my shame of my country

I used to be a professor teaching about this. 

Now I'm an activist, a human rights activist, and what drives me is my shame at living in anotherwise great nation that has less than five percent of the world's population but almost 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. It's the people I meet who have lost someone they love to drug-related violence or prison or overdose or AIDS because our drug policies emphasize criminalization over health. 

It's good people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their freedom, even their children to the state, not because they hurt anyone but solely because they chose to use one drug instead of another.

-Ethan Nedelmann, DPA