A Quote by L. Neil Smith
America didn't have a drug problem before it passed drug laws. While drugs were consumed by large numbers of people — the number of women habituated to the opium found in laudanum was, no pun intended, staggering — they were, for the most part, easily able to live their lives, do their jobs, and raise their families pretty much the way we do today.
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Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be
convicted and they ought to be sent up.
There is one-and only one-way to end the violence in Latin America. There is one-and only one-way to terminate the drug gangs. That way is by legalizing drugs. Legalizing drugs today would put an immediate end to the drug gangs and the drug-war violence.
It seemed that the problem of Americans overdosing and dying from drug addiction was being described as bad people, particularly kids, who were abusing good drugs. But Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, and I were particularly interested in finding out the stories of people and families who had been ravaged by this disease of addiction and understanding what really was happening. What we found was that, and let's not make any mistake about it, this is an epidemic of addiction.
I'll get rid of the drug problem. The first drug dealer will be publicly executed in front of everybody and all of the sudden the rest of the drug dealers are going to go "Uh oh!" Watch how fast the drug problem disappears. If you use drugs, you're addicted and you steal something, you'll get sent off to the outback and to work camps and all of the sudden no drug addicts. See how simple that is? So simple.
"Drugs" are not necessarily narcotics. The narcotic is one type of drug and coffee is a drug... booze is a drug... many drugs.... They're all around us.
The War on Drugs is a war on people, but particularly it's been a war on low-income people and a war on minorities. We know in the United States of America there is no difference in drug use between black, white and Latinos. But if you're Latino in the United States of America, you're about twice as likely to be arrested for drug use than if you're white. If you're black, you are about four times as likely to be arrested if you're African American than if you are white. This drug war has done so much to destroy, undermine, sabotage families, communities, neighborhoods, cities.
They never differentiate between drug users and drug addicts... I've done most drugs there are socially, I never had a problem.
To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep, for their own use, up to 80 percent of the cash, cars, and homes seized from suspected drug offenders. You don't even have to be convicted of a drug offense; if you're just suspected of a drug offense, law enforcement has the right to keep the cash they find on you or in your home, or seize your car if drugs are allegedly found in it or "suspected" of being transported in the vehicle.
In 1970, there were approximately 330,000 prisoners in the US. Today there are 2.3 million behind bars - more than any country in the history of the world. In 2009 alone there were 1.6 million drug-related arrests in the U.S. 1.3 million of these were for possession of drugs alone. Over half were related to marijuana. The forty-year war on drugs has cost $2.5 trillion.
A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.
Our teenage "druggies" are habituated to drugs rather than addicted. While beer and other alcoholic beverages are preferred drugs, kids have simply not used alcohol long enough to become addicted. The other drug of preference - marijuana - is not addictive.
We have now spent 1 trillion dollars waging the drug war since it began. A trillion. Those funds could have been used for education, jobs and drug treatment in the communities that needed it most. We could have used those funds for our collective well being, instead those dollars paved the way for the destruction of countless lives, families, and dreams.
We respect the freedom of all citizens. Young people should have fun, but there is no tolerance of drug abuse. Drugs have become a serious problem in Vietnam. This is why we have very strict penalties for any sort of drug dealing.
Suffice it to say that Wall Street investors in the drug industries have used the government to unleash and transform their economic power into political and global military might; never forget, America is not an opium or cocaine producing nation, and narcotic drugs are a strategic resource, upon which all of the above industries - including the military - depend. Controlling the world's drug supply, both legal and illegal, is a matter of national security.
For all of life's discontents, according to the pharmaceutical industry, there is a drug and you should take it. Then for the side effects of that drug, then there's another drug, and so on. So we're all taking more drugs, and more expensive drugs.
It is not enough to show that drug A is better than drug B on the average. One is invited to ask, 'For which people ("& why") is drug A better than drug B, and vice versa? If drug A cures 40% and drug B cures 60%, perhaps the right choice of drug for each person would result in 100% cures.'
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