HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivers remarks at the Rx and Illicit Drug Summit in Nashville, Tennessee.
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00:00...introduced Robert F. Penn, Jr., the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
00:08He has spent his entire career in public service.
00:11Starting in 1905 as an attorney for the environmental non-product of River River,
00:16he eventually became one of the most influential environmentalists in the United States,
00:22focusing especially on the impact of pollution on human health and the conservation of health and health systems.
00:28Kennedy went up and co-found the Water Keeper Alliance and served as a president for 21 years.
00:35Under his direction, it became the world's largest non-profit devoted to clean water.
00:41He also co-founded the non-profit Children's Health Defense.
00:45Through hundreds of legal victories, Kennedy learned the inner workings of the system
00:49and became deeply familiar with the science of human health, both from a conventional and alternative perspective.
00:55Now, as the Secretary of HHS, he is putting that knowledge to work to align it with the public interest.
01:02Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
01:08Thank you all very much.
01:22I know that for all of you, your lives, each one of you have been touched by this disease.
01:29And my life was, and my family is no exemption.
01:35I lost my brother, who was my closest friend to this disease.
01:39I lost another brother, not directly through overdose, but through what I believe is a symptom of this disease.
01:46During the pandemic, I lost a niece who was like a daughter to me, who lived in our home for much of her life, went on vacations with us.
01:58And we think that she took her first drug and overdosed on it and died at my mom's house.
02:09I lost another niece a few months later, not to death, but she is a quadriplegic.
02:16She was sober.
02:16She went out for just a night, and she became a quadriplegic.
02:37And so we're all affected by this.
02:39I was personally affected, so I'm HHS secretary.
02:42And I was given a speech by one of my agencies, by two of them, and it was loaded with the grim inventories that document the terrible, the catastrophic cost of this disease in recent years to our country.
02:58I thought it might be more helpful to all of you if you, to share some of my own experience with this disease and some of the lessons that I've learned from recovery.
03:14I was born in a very, very, and raised in an extremely close and Catholic family.
03:23I don't know if my addiction was a result of genes.
03:27My mother's family had alcoholism all the way back to the Neanderthal times.
03:34And she was one of the only members to escape it, or whether it came from trauma or anything.
03:42And it's really irrelevant how I got it.
03:47People say you don't look at the past.
03:49You look at the past, but you don't stare at it.
03:51And, you know, I know that the only way that I stay sober is through taking responsibility for my daily actions.
04:02By accepting things I can't control and trying to practice gratitude for them, and with the knowledge that the only thing that I really control is this little piece of real estate inside of my own shoes.
04:23And I can have control over my behavior, my daily conduct, and not of the world around me.
04:31And I can't let the world around me control me.
04:35But I was, you know, I was close.
04:39I had a huge family, 29 cousins, 11 brothers and sisters, all very close.
04:46We went to daily mass in the summertime, sometimes two masses a day.
04:50We said the rosary every night, we prayed before and after each meal, we read the Bible every night.
04:57And I integrated a lot of that into my life.
05:00It was an Irish Catholic community, and we were the schools, and our family was conscious that this disease disproportionately impacts our race.
05:12We call it the Irish flu.
05:13And it was a custom in our schools to take the pledge, which came from Ireland.
05:24So you would swear that you would never take a drink in your lifetime.
05:28And you were given a pledge pin if you were willing to take that vow.
05:32And I took it when I was a kid, and I took that responsibility very seriously, that commitment very seriously.
05:37At the time I was 15 years old, I never even drank coffee.
05:43And my father died the summer before.
05:46And that summer, I went to a party, a going away party for an elder brother of a friend of mine, who was being shipped to Vietnam.
05:58He'd been drafted, and the party turned into a melee, and he ended up hitting a cop and going to jail instead of Vietnam.
06:08But I was hitchhiking home from that party, and an older boy, who I knew but only vaguely, picked me up, and he offered me a tab of LSD.
06:17And LSD had come to Cape Cod that night, which was 1969.
06:24And a lot of people in my town, as it turned out, had taken it.
06:27I would never have taken it, but the town that I lived in had one store, and had a post office in one store.
06:35And every Tuesday, the comic books came to that store.
06:38And I was addicted to comic books, as were a lot of my peers.
06:42And my favorite comic was a comic called Turok, Son of Stone, which was about these two Indians.
06:49And about two weeks before, the episode was that they had taken mescaline or peyote or some kind of hallucinogen,
06:57and they were transported back in time, and they saw dinosaurs.
07:01And I had a deep interest in paleontology.
07:05And I said, I said to the guy, if I take that, will I see dinosaurs?
07:10And he said, you might.
07:12And I ended up taking it, and I had this wonderful experience of very, very intense hallucinations.
07:21But in the morning, I was remorseful.
07:24And I was kicking myself and saying, you swore you would never do this.
07:28You broke your commitment to yourself.
07:31And I swore to myself I would never take drugs again.
07:34And I was walking home from the town, which is about three miles from my home.
07:40And I was getting darker and darker as I crashed from the acid.
07:44And when I saw each other, and I had to go home and face my mom, I had violated my curfew, and my mother had invented tough love.
07:53And I saw some older boys in the woods near my home.
08:00And I went in to see what they were doing, and I told them that I was scratching on the acid.
08:05And they said, try some of this.
08:07And it was a line of crystal meth.
08:08And I took it, and all my problems went away, just evaporated.
08:14And I felt better than I'd ever felt in my life.
08:16And my progression, they say that your addiction is doing push-ups when you're not doing it and getting strong.
08:24And my addiction came on full force.
08:27And within about three weeks, I was shooting meth.
08:31And by the end of the summer, I was shooting heroin, which was my drug of choice in the next 14 years, until I was 28 years old.
08:39And to me, I tried earnestly, sincerely, and honestly to quit constantly.
08:47I made pledges to my brothers, to my friends, to my family.
08:51I took vows.
08:53I wrote out agreements and contracts.
08:55I sought a psychiatrist.
08:57I did everything that I could think of, and nothing worked.
09:01And to me, the most demoralizing feature of this disease was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself.
09:10And I would tell myself at 9 in the morning, I'm never going to do that again.
09:14And I would absolutely believe it and be committed to it.
09:18At 4 o'clock, I was doing it.
09:21And I had no control over that person that I was going to be at 4 o'clock.
09:27And, of course, like most addicts, I interpreted this as a moral failure, as a character failure.
09:35And that set this addiction of morosity, of self-loathing, of darkness.
09:45And I came in.
09:47I got arrested in September of 1983.
09:51And at that time, the cat was out of the bag.
09:53And I was able to do things, including go to 12-step programs, which I would have never done before.
09:59Because of my family and the way that I've been raised, the last thing I would do was to share the secrets that I had with a crowd that I didn't know.
10:07So suddenly I could do that.
10:10And I knew that I needed a spiritual awakening.
10:16Because I did not want to be the person that I was.
10:21I wanted to be just a normal person who didn't wake up in the morning thinking of drugs and thinking about them all day and devoting my energies to that.
10:29But I wanted to be somebody who just got up in the morning and went to work and had a normal life.
10:35I didn't want to be that person.
10:37And I definitely did not want to be somebody who was white-knuckling it, who was on the street trying to not take drugs and wanting them all the time.
10:48I just wanted to be a different person.
10:51I've 12-stepped many people in my program over the years.
10:56And a couple of times people said to me, including a cousin who is now dead from this disease.
11:03He said to me, I don't want to go to that program, that 12-stepped program, because they brainwash you.
11:09But if somebody had said to me that time and I could get brainwashed, I would say bring it on.
11:14Because my brain needed washing.
11:17I did not want to be that person.
11:18And I had a friend, my little brother's best friend, who used to take drugs the same way that I did.
11:35And, you know, snorting lines and shooting dope.
11:40And he became a Mooney.
11:41He joined the Unification Church.
11:44And he became a follower of Reverend Sun Young Moon.
11:46And he would still hang out with us, but he just didn't want drugs anymore.
11:50And we could do them right in front of him.
11:52And he had no compulsion.
11:55And I used to think about him when I first started getting sober.
11:58And I would think to myself, because I had a lot of biases at that time, well, I'd rather be dead than be a Mooney.
12:06But I wish there was some way for me to distill whatever he had that made him impervious to that compulsion without becoming, you know, a religious nuisance.
12:17And I, at that time, I picked up a book that was just laying on a table by Carl Jung called Synchronicity.
12:29The only reason I picked it up was because it was an album by the police at that time by the same name.
12:35And it had just come out.
12:38And I didn't know what the word was.
12:40And Synchronicity is a coincidence.
12:45It's like the kind of thing that all of us experience at one time or another, where you're, for example, talking about somebody that you haven't thought about in 20 years, and the phone rings, and it's that person on the phone.
12:57And Young, who was a deeply spiritual man and played a key role in developing the spiritual dimensions of the 12-step program, he was a protege of Freud.
13:10And unlike Freud, who was an avowed atheist, youngest deeply spiritual man, and he had authentic spiritual experiences from when he was a little boy.
13:19And he said, in this book, he was trying all these ways to, he had a lot of synchronicities in his life, and they were transformational experiences for him.
13:32For example, at one point, he was sitting with a patient, and he was on the third floor of his sanatorium, which was the biggest sanatorium in Europe.
13:43And it was a female patient, and she was talking about a dream.
13:46And the fulcrum of that dream was a scarab beetle, which is a creature that doesn't exist in northern Europe.
13:53It's a very common piece of iconography.
13:55It was a spiritual resonance on the hyeroglyphics of Egypt, on the tombs of the obelis, etc.
14:01And all he's talking to her, he hears this bing, bing, bing, on the wall, on the window behind him.
14:09And he doesn't want to take his attention away from the patient to find out what it is.
14:13But finally, in exasperation, he stands up and throws open the window, and a scarab beetle flies in and lands in his palm.
14:22And he turns to the woman and says, wasn't this what you were dreaming about?
14:25And those kind of things happen to him all the time, and he believed that that was God's way of breaking all of his rules,
14:34the rules of probability, of chance, of biology, of physics, to reach in and touch us on the shoulder and say,
14:42I'm here with you and looking out and watching you, and I'm with you and giving you strength.
14:49And Jung tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting.
14:53He's a very faithful scientist, as well as a deeply spiritual man.
14:58So he'd put one guy in one room and another guy in another room, and he'd have them pick, uh, turn over cards
15:04and try to guess what the other guy had picked.
15:08And if he felt that if he could break the law as a probability,
15:14and he would have proven that there is a supernatural, in other words, natural laws,
15:18and he would have proven that there's something supernatural,
15:21now is the first step of proving the existence of a God,
15:25which he was very interested in doing.
15:27And he says in this book, which I really respected, that he could never succeed in doing that.
15:32But he said that he was unable to prove the existence of God using empirical spiritual tools.
16:02tools, empirical or scientific tools, of having seen tens of thousands of patients come through
16:08his facility, he said he could prove that people who believed in God got better faster
16:14and that their recovery was more – and that their recovery was more enduring.
16:26And for me, that was much more impactful than if he had said that he had proved the existence
16:29of God which I wouldn't have believed. What he was saying is that if you believe in God,
16:34you're more likely to get sober, and that your sobriety is going to be more enduring.
16:41So I had believed in God from when I was a kid, and now it's completely integrated in my system.
16:48And when you live against conscience for a long period of time, you push any notion of God over
16:53the periphery of your horizons. So God, at that point in my life, was a theoretical construct.
16:58It wasn't a being who had any kind of relationship with me on a day-to-day basis.
17:04So I made just an intellectual decision, because at that time I had committed that I will do anything
17:12that improves my chance of sobriety, even by 1%. So I just made a decision, I'm going to start believing
17:20in God. And then I was confronted with this dilemma that everybody who makes that kind of decision
17:26confronts, which is how do you start believing in something that you can't see or smell or touch
17:33your taste or acquire with your senses. And he unsolves that problem. He says, fake it till
17:39you make it. Act as if, and that the obedience and the faith will precede the evidence. The evidence
17:47will become overwhelming. At first, you have to make that choice.
17:51So, I made this decision and, you know, I started behaving like that. I put, I knew what it looked
18:01like to have faith. And I put religious iconography, a picture of St. Jude as a saint of hopeless causes.
18:07St. Francis, who was my patron saint, and other religious iconography around my bed. I knelt and prayed.
18:15And I prayed for faith, because I didn't have any. And I prayed to make it easier for me to believe in something.
18:23And I started then behaving as if there was God up there. And he was watching me all the time.
18:31And that my, that I had to behave myself, even when I didn't have an audience.
18:37So, I started breaking my day down into about 40 different moral decisions. Do I, do I stay, do I get up when the alarm goes off?
18:47Or do I stay in bed another 15 minutes with my indolent thoughts? Do I make the bed when I go up?
18:53I've been on the road for two and a half years living in hotels. And I make the bed every day, which is insane.
19:01But I do it. I do it because, I do it because I made a commitment and I can keep commitments now.
19:09I do it because what I'm trying to do is to build character. And not to, you know, make a big pile for myself.
19:18And whoever dies with the most stuff wins. And it's all about building character, because the wealth you build, the fame, is illusory.
19:26Do I put the water in the ice tray when I put the ice tray back in the freezer?
19:39Do I, when I reach into my closet and pull out some blue jeans and all those little wire hangers fall on the floor,
19:46do I shut the door like I used to and say that's somebody else's job? I'm too much of a big shot for that.
19:53Or do I go in and clean up my mess? Do I put the park, the shopping cart back in the place where it's supposed to go in the park rather than leaving it in the parking lot?
20:03When I first got sober, my, about, probably six or eight weeks into sobriety, my life was already, my life was getting very, very small from addiction.
20:13And it started getting very big again. And I was running through National Airport to catch a plane that was mission critical that I'd be on that plane.
20:22I was already late and probably going to miss it. And as I was running, I was putting dentine in my head.
20:30And I was thinking, the apocalypse is going to happen if I don't get on that plane.
20:34I was putting a piece of dentine in my mouth and I bowled up the wrapper.
20:38And as I ran, I threw it. And the wrapper did a perfect arc, squished it right into the trash can.
20:44And as I was running by, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, that it jumped back out again.
20:51It must have hit something in there. And I said to myself, well, that's God's fault, because I made the shot.
21:01And I got about 40 feet down that runway and it just started eating at me.
21:06And ultimately, I put on the brakes and went back and put that in. And I made the plane.
21:12But the most important thing I did that day was that little act, because it was, that's how I maintained that posture of surrender.
21:20And for me, surrender was easy when I first came in, because my life made it obvious that I didn't know how to run things.
21:36And I had to let somebody else, which was God, run them.
21:39When the cash prizes start flowing in, my inclination is to say, thanks, God, I got it from here.
21:46And take the wheel of the car and drive off the cliff again.
21:50And the challenge for me, and I think for all of us who are trying to maintain long-term sobriety, is how do we stay in that posture of surrender, even when everything's going well in our lives?
22:03And my life started going well, and it'd be these miracles.
22:08We had, you know, when I first came in in September of 1983, I go to a meeting every day.
22:15I got off the plane last night and I went to a meeting.
22:18And when I came in 42 years ago, I said to a guy, how long do you have to keep coming to these meetings?
22:26And he said, just keep coming until you like it.
22:29I've been coming 42 years, and I still don't like it.
22:34But I go every day because when I go, the rest of my life works.
22:40The lights turn green for me.
22:42The parking places open up.
22:44People answer the phone.
22:46The projects that I work on get over the gold line.
22:49And it's kind of this magic that it makes no sense logically.
22:54And then when things do go wrong, I know how to handle crises.
22:58I know what to say to people when they have a loved one lost.
23:01I know how to handle failure in my own life.
23:04And I've learned that God talks to me through other human beings.
23:10God talks to us through many vectors, through each other,
23:13who organize religions, through the great books of those religions,
23:16through wise people, through art, literature, music, poetry, through nature.
23:22But nowhere with a kind of texture and grace and precision and joys of other human beings.
23:29And addiction is about isolation.
23:32Addicts end up in jails, institutions, and death.
23:36And even when I was surrounded by people, which was the fact, the truth, for much of my life,
23:43I was still alone.
23:46Because I was looking at life and relationships through this mesh of dishonesty, of vanity, of arrogance.
24:05And a complete lack of intimacy, a complete real, authentic connection to community.
24:14And part of this program that I work is about increasing my connection to community.
24:23And seeing God in every person, even people that I don't particularly like.
24:34In fact, God talks to me most through those people.
24:38So when somebody gives me the finger on the street because they don't like my driving,
24:51I have to say that's God talking to me.
24:54And what does he want me to learn?
24:57What does he want me to learn from this interaction?
25:00What am I supposed to do with this interaction?
25:03Should I pray for that person?
25:05Or should I pull him out of the car?
25:07Which is what I used to do.
25:09And it has a magical impact on me.
25:15Thank you very much.
25:18We have an addiction and an overdose crisis in this country.
25:34I think last year we lost 106,000 kids.
25:49This is double the number that we lost during the 20-year Vietnam War.
25:54And we need to pay the same attention to this crisis, which is a national security threat,
26:00and a threat to everything we love about our country as Vietnam.
26:06And, you know, President Trump –
26:11President Trump was in – three weeks ago he met with Claudia Scheinbaum, the new president of Mexico.
26:18And he said to her, all of the drugs are coming through your country.
26:21Do you have an addiction problem?
26:23And she said, no, not really.
26:25And he said, why is that?
26:27And she said, because we have strong families in this country.
26:31And one of the things that – you know, addiction is a source of misery.
26:38It's also a symptom of misery.
26:41And it – you know, it's a source that makes the addict miserable and it makes everybody who his relationships with miserable.
26:50It's also a symptom of misery, of grief, of trauma, of loneliness, of alienation, of disconvention.
27:01One of my favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis is he said, I spend so much time with grief that I – I spend so much time with anger that I came to know that her name was grief.
27:14And all of us have – all of us have grief in our lives and trauma in our lives, everybody.
27:23And the – you know, for me, my solution for trauma was I felt like I was born with an empty hole inside of myself.
27:32That I had to fill it with things outside of myself.
27:35And those are the only things that worked for me.
27:38And every addict feels that way in one way or another, that they have to fix what's wrong with them.
27:44And the only thing that works are drugs.
27:47And so the threats that you might die, you're going to ruin your life was completely meaningless to me.
27:54Because I needed relief from that pain.
27:57And the – I found that in the 12-step program.
28:01The 12 steps are about getting rid of isolation, overcoming isolation, and reestablishing our connection to community.
28:11And, you know, I see each of us as a vessel of godliness.
28:18And that we're connected to all these different relationships.
28:21Some of them are very big, like PVC pipes coming into this vessel.
28:26Those are our wives, our children, our parents, our aunts, our mothers, our best friends.
28:32And then some of them are little tiny pipes, like the guy who gives a finger to me on the street.
28:38They're all relationships.
28:41And if we're working well, then there's liquid flowing through that into us.
28:47And our job is to amplify it and send it back out to the world.
28:50That's God's power.
28:52What addiction does is our character defects, our pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, average, sloth, dishonesty, selfishness, arrogance.
29:05We plug up each of those channels.
29:09And by the end, we're alone.
29:11And that vessel is stagnant.
29:14And that's the definition of insanity.
29:17And the 12-step programs that I practice are about going out, dealing with – admitting and dealing with your own character defects.
29:28Acknowledging them and even learning to love them.
29:31And then unclogging all of those channels by going out and making amends to people we harmed.
29:38And in that way, God's power comes back into us.
29:42Now, what does that mean for national policy?
29:45What it means is we have to do all of the nuts and bolts things that you are all involved with.
29:52The practical, pragmatic things we need.
29:54Suboxone.
29:55We need methadone.
29:57We need an altraxone.
29:59We need an archon.
30:00We need good fentanyl detectors that can detect it on pills, et cetera, so the kids are less likely to overdose.
30:14We need prevention.
30:16We need education.
30:18And we need treatment.
30:23And we have $4 billion at my agency to finance those solutions and those attacks on addiction and overdose.
30:33That alone, throwing money at it, is not alone going to work.
30:37We need to really focus on reestablishing these historicized communities.
30:44We have this whole generation of kids who have lost hope in their future.
30:49It was a – in 2013, there was a poll in which people under 40 years of age were asked,
30:57are you proud of the United States of America?
31:00And 90 percent of them said yes.
31:03The same poll taken last year, 17 percent said yes.
31:09You know, you have this whole generation of children that's lost faith in our country,
31:14lost because they've lost faith in their own futures.
31:17And they've lost their ties to community.
31:20And one of the things we need to do, by the way we live our own lives individually,
31:25but also through policy changes, is to try to reestablish for those kids, one, hope for the future,
31:32but also a sense of connection and usefulness to community.
31:38And there's many ways that we can do that, and particularly through service.
31:43Bill Wilson established the AA program.
31:46Well, you know, he went to the Oxford Group, which was a predecessor organization,
31:51which had eight steps that were – eight of the steps that are part of the AA program,
31:55but originally there was just eight, and they were designed to induce a spiritual awakening,
32:00and he had a spiritual awakening.
32:02His desire, like for me, the day I had it, I never had a desire for drugs and alcohol.
32:07And the same thing happened to him, and he was six months down the road,
32:11could not imagine that he'd ever drink again.
32:13It was incomprehensible to him that anything like that would ever happen.
32:17He went out to Akron, Ohio, an ink deal to buy the big vendor for Firestone and Goodyear,
32:24which had made him a millionaire during the height of the Depression.
32:28And he had spent his entire fortune preparing for that deal.
32:33When he got out there, another company came in and undermined it,
32:36and they signed the deal.
32:38And he had a moment standing in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel in Akron,
32:44and the entire compulsion to drink came back to him in full force like he'd never experienced it before.
32:50And he was 20 feet from the lounge.
32:54He could hear the clinking of the ice in the glass.
32:57He could hear the laughter of the patrons.
32:59And it was summoning him to go back into that bar.
33:04And he had the central revelation of all the 12-step programs,
33:09which was the only way he was going to stay sober that night,
33:12is if he found another alcoholic to help.
33:15And he went into a phone booth and started frantically dying,
33:19dialing Preacher at Salvation Army Hospital looking for an alcoholic in Akron.
33:23And he found Dr. Bob.
33:26Dr. Bob agreed to meet with him.
33:28Dr. Bob had heard it all and was not interested,
33:32but he agreed because he was a nice guy.
33:34And when he walked in, he said, you've got 15 minutes.
33:38They ended up talking all night, and that was the first AA meeting.
33:42And they agreed the next day,
33:44the only way we can stay sober is by helping another alcoholic.
33:48So service until, Wilson,
33:53realize you can't live off the laurels of the spiritual awakening.
33:57You get a daily reprieve.
34:00You have to renew the spiritual awakening every day,
34:02and the way that you do that is being useful to another person.
34:06And, you know, I tell people who are unhappy with their lives,
34:10who lost a boyfriend or girlfriend, who are in a depression,
34:14I say one of the best ways to deal with that is to wake up in the morning,
34:19and instead of saying, what can I do to make myself happy?
34:22What can I do to make myself more loved?
34:26What can I do to get my boyfriend back?
34:29I say, when you get up in the morning,
34:32you have to ask one question.
34:34You have to say, reporting for duty, sir.
34:36And then you have to ask one question and say one prayer.
34:40Please make me useful to another human being today.
34:51Well, I would encourage you all to think broadly about what our mission is,
34:58because it's not just about getting,
35:00making sure every cop and every paramedic has naltrexone.
35:03That's important.
35:05And it's not just a prevention on the border.
35:08That's important.
35:09It's not just making sure that every addict, when they have those moments,
35:13when they're willing to ask for help,
35:15that there's a rehab ready for them to go to.
35:18And that is critically important.
35:20But there are bigger issues.
35:22How do we restore our families?
35:25How do we restore that commitment to community?
35:28You know, I was in Virginia the other day,
35:33and I went to a school where they have cell phone used back.
35:39The public school.
35:40The grades have skyrocketed.
35:42The test scores have skyrocketed.
35:44The violence has dropped.
35:46And I walked through the lunchroom and saw kids talking to each other.
35:50Nobody was looking at a cell phone.
35:52I went to the Mennonite community a couple of years, a couple of weeks ago.
36:02The same thing.
36:03There were kids.
36:04They discouraged to use the cell phones.
36:06The kids, we had a huge mass dinner with 400 people.
36:10The kids were all sitting together talking and laughing.
36:13They were out playing in the parking lot with each other,
36:17and nobody was looking at a cell phone.
36:19And these little devices that we have are taking us away from each other.
36:24And that feeds the addiction crisis.
36:28And what we need to learn to do is to...
36:31One of the great things that they told me there is they said,
36:35you know, when I was at Louisa County in Virginia,
36:38they said the parents, I talked to the parents, and they said it's so great
36:42because now the kid, it's much easier to tell the kid,
36:46don't use a cell phone when they're from your driver.
36:49Don't use it at the dinner table.
36:51And they have dinners with each other when they actually talk with each other.
36:55And all of us in this age have a hard time being parents.
36:59But we can also educate the parents.
37:02Yeah, have a meal.
37:03Sit down with your kids.
37:05Have a conversation with the cell phones or band.
37:08And do these other...
37:10And then give them opportunities for service.
37:13Because everybody wants to be effective in their lives.
37:16Everybody wants to be useful.
37:18And when you're serving other people,
37:20that has a magical impact on your life.
37:22It takes away the depression.
37:25The self-will run riot.
37:27You focus instead on another person's problem,
37:30at least for a few moments in the day.
37:32And that is a reprieve.
37:34And we need to think creatively about providing them those opportunities.
37:40And saying, you know, banning cell phones in school is one of the things that we need to do to remedy addiction.
37:47Not just all the standard nuts and bolts things, which we need to do.
37:52We need to do everything we can to reestablish hope in our kids.
37:57To reestablish a sense of mission in their lives.
38:00A sense of purposefulness.
38:02And opportunities for them to act as part of a community.
38:07So, thank you all very much for your commitment to this issue.
38:11And God bless you.