A Quote by Noam Chomsky

One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story.

Noam Chomsky

Quote Topics

Almost Another Answer Anywhere Ask Corporations Crop Difficulty Easily Grown Legal Little Major Marijuana Might Nature Possible Quite Story Suggested Tobacco Why

Quote Author

Noam Chomsky
American - Activist
Born: December 7, 1928

One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop.

Noam Chomsky

Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?

Ralph Nader

Science could never get you to make alcohol and tobacco legal and marijuana illegal. Only racism can do that.

Maia Szalavitz

Tobacco is the second most dangerous drug available to our culture. Number one is alcohol follow by many pharmacy pills. So no, marijuana is not more dangerous then tobacco.

Steven Machat

In fact, marijuana lowers your stress level and lowers your body temperature. It actually seems that people live longer if they use it. If you substitute marijuana for tobacco and alcohol, you'll add 24 years to your life.

Jack Herer

I don't think young black men, or anybody, should get a criminal record for low-level use. You know, I don't think that we should spend our law enforcement time jailing or imprisoning marijuana users. But to solve that problem, you don't need to go to the other extreme of creating Big Tobacco 2.0. Make no mistake about it: Legalization is not about, you know, Cheech & Chong smoking marijuana or, you know, a Grateful Dead concert; it's about creating the next Marlboro of our time, the next Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, the Big Tobacco all over again.

Kevin Sabet

Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade - and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.

George Soros

If you substitute marijuana for tobacco and alcohol, you'll add eight to 24 years to your life.

Jack Herer

I'm for legalizing marijuana. Why pick on those drugs? Valium is legal. You just go to a doctor and get it and overdose on it - what's the difference? Prozac, all that stuff, so why not marijuana? Who cares? It's something that grows out of the ground - why not? Go smoke a head of cabbage. I don't care what you smoke.

Howard Stern

We are just coming out of a 100-year stupor from being lied to by the tobacco industry for a century about the effects on young people, on cancer, these candy cigarettes that they promised had nothing to do with kids, Joe Camel that they promised was focused on the, you know, 55-year-old white male smoker, which we know is wrong. And we finally got out of that. Why in the world would we want to create the same thing, just not Big Tobacco this time, Big Marijuana?

Kevin Sabet

I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it's tobacco, then let it be tobacco.

Anton Chekhov

The government has a monopoly on the supply of marijuana that you can use in FDA-approved research. So even though there are 20 states and the District of Columbia [that have legalized medical marijuana], and there's marijuana everywhere, we've spent seven years trying to get 10 grams of marijuana for vaporizer research. We're the only people in America that can't get 10 grams of marijuana.

Rick Doblin

Marijuana has become like currency. Anytime you grow a crop like marijuana, or wheat, or corn, or anything that people consume on a daily basis, you're [getting] into a huge economic area.

Tommy Chong

I have been addicted to it, and it's ultimately related to anxiety coping, and it's a form of self-medication, and I was smoking up to 15 to 20 marijuana cigarettes a day with no tobacco.

Lady Gaga

I did a little bit of cocaine in the Eighties, courtesy of John Belushi, but fortunately I didn’t like it. But I smoked marijuana for 50 years and I don’t know where I’d be without it. It opened my mind and now it eases my arthritis. After decades of research I’ve concluded that marijuana should be legal and alcohol illegal.