Cori Bush

If your job is to protect and serve, if your job is to take care of the community in which you serve, then do that.

We have to change this conversation. You know, why are we catching it on the back end?

Words can build up communities or break them down.

It causes harm to people, especially people of color, and so to call it out as if it does not matter, it does, because we're talking about lives at stake.

The rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans is inherently tied to anti-Asian American rhetoric, some of which have come out of this very chamber.

Leading from a place of hate only fuels hateful and violent acts across our country.

What I am taking away is maybe there is one thing that everybody across the dais here can agree on, and that is that addiction is a disease. It is a deadly disease.

The vicious and carceral drug war that has prioritized punishment over treatment, violence over healing, and trauma over dignity has influenced all our lives.

I came to Congress committed to one goal: To do the absolute most for everyone in St. Louis, starting with those who have the least.

Ending the criminalization of simple drug possession does not mean turning a blind eye to the misery that substance use disorder can cause.

I lived through a malicious marijuana war that saw Black people arrested for possession at three times the rate of their White counterparts.

We have 40 years to show that we have not addressed that demand, and it is time to try something else instead of continuing the same failed policies.

We must learn from our mistakes.

If the Federal Government takes leadership, we will see more responsible policy at the State level.

This is a public health crisis. Too often drug offenses are borne out of poverty.

We know that punishment does not work.

Somehow, we have criticized science and compassion in favor of trauma and punishment.

This punitive approach creates more pain, increases substance use, and leaves millions of people to live in shame and isolation.

Criminalization, simply put, is not an effective public safety policy.

It is time to turn the page and to create a new drug policy for America, including offering alternatives to incarceration.

We need to listen to experts and the data to determine the right approaches to our evidence-based and data-driven.

The war on drugs was a flawed program and it simply didn't work.

We have to start telling the truth, and that is that racism underlines many of the policy decisions that we put forth.

The CDC has estimated that as many as 350,000 people in North County, my community, have been exposed to radioactive waste.

The environmental violence of the Departments of Energy and Defense has emblazoned my community with extremely hazardous radioactive waste.