No, they haven’t approached drugs at all the right way. I’m upset, for example, that the MIAMI VICEs of the world look at drug offenders the same way we looked at insane people 300 years ago. What emotional things are we doing to those people who need a substance to get by? We should be examining that, not the criminal aspect of drugs. It may be that unless our world becomes more perfect some people are always going to need mood changers.
Gene Roddenberry in an interview in the 1980s with Allan Asherman, printed in The Star Trek Interview Book (1988)
I love that Gene Roddenberry was talking about addiction as a mental health issue in the 1980s and acknowledging how mental illness is not just an individual issue, but also a social and systemic one.
