Top 1200 Drug Prohibition Quotes & Sayings

Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.

If you're really on some heavily addictive drug, you think about the drug, and everything else is secondary. You try and make everything work, but the drug comes first.

The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture.

I do not believe that marijuana is a gateway drug, and having been a mayor trying to keep my community safe, if there was any drug that was driving violence, more than marijuana, it was alcohol which is legal. And so I just don't think this is a gateway drug. And by the way, if you regulate it you're actually going to overcome a lot of problems with people having to go to the streets to buy their drug. You don't know how dangerous that is.

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.

In the 1920s, we thought the problems associated with alcohol could be solved by police and jails. Prohibition taught us we were wrong. The strategy of the present drug war is Prohibition redux.

No political party can ever make prohibition effective. A political party implies an adverse, an opposing, political party. To enforce criminal statutes implies substantial unanimity in the community. This is the result of the jury system. Hence the futility of party prohibition.

The worst prohibition, it must be said, is a prohibition on thinking - and that, sadly, is what the U.S. government is guilty of today.

Defenders of the system will counter by saying this drug war has been aimed at violent crime. But that is not the case. The overwhelming majority of people arrested in the drug war have been arrested for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses.

Influenza is a serious disease. Kids die of influenza, both in Japan and the United States, and if you give a drug to people who are at risk of dying, there will be people who die who got the drug,... There is no signal the drug is doing it as opposed to the disease.

Consider the clinicaltrials by which drugs are tested in human subjects.5 Before a new drug can enter the market, its manufacturer must sponsor clinicaltrials to show the Food and Drug Administration that the drug is safe and effective, usually as compared with a placebo or dummy pill. The results of all the trials (there may be many) are submitted to the FDA, and if one or two trials are positive—that is, they show effectiveness without serious risk—the drug is usually approved, even if all the other trials are negative.

We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.

When the United States was in control of counternarcotics, the US governments used drug trafficking for purely geopolitical purposes .... The US uses drug trafficking and terrorism for political control .... We have nationalised the fight against drug trafficking.

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.

We've got to get our drug industry back. Our drug industry has been disastrous. They're leaving left and right. They supply our drugs, but they don't make them here, to a large extent. And the other thing we have to do is create new bidding procedures for the drug industry because they're getting away with murder.

Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see?

There is a safe, nontoxic drug called naloxone that can instantly reverse opioid overdose and prevent most of these deaths. But the drug war interferes with saving overdose victims in two ways: first, because witnesses to overdose fear prosecution, they often don't call for help until it's too late. Second, because the drug war supports the belief that making naloxone available over-the-counter or with opioid prescriptions would encourage drug use, the antidote is available only through harm reduction programs like needle exchanges or in some state programs aimed at drug users.

Why is there such controversy about drug testing? I know plenty of guys who'd be willing to test any drug they can come up with.

I belong to the Congress. My party has always supported prohibition, though it may not have been successful in implementing prohibition in many states.

It's very difficult to have any faith in the sincerity of the SLORC about stamping out drug production if they find it so easy to forgive a drug baron whom at one time they said they would never, never forgive and would never, never regard as anything but a drug runner. The SLORC is far more aggressive in its attitude toward the National League for Democracy than against drug traffickers.

To drive down high drug costs, we need to shine a light on the negotiations between drug manufacturers, middleman negotiators and pharmacies.

There are criminals who are drug users, but most addicts are criminals only by virtue of prohibition or from resorting to crime to pay inflated black market prices.

Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.

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.'

If even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and drug rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to users could be dramatic.

The drug lord is on the run. His name is El Chapo. Donald Trump is in a Twitter feud with this Mexican drug lord. It's historic - the first time Americans have ever sided with a Mexican drug lord.

We are for abstinence, not prohibition. Prohibition leads to many socio-legal problems. Wherever liquor has been prohibited, there is a tendency to consume through illegal means.

Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction.

Well I have a drug history and a public drinking problem and I am not the healthiest guy. So they just ran that I died of a drug overdose.

Drug prohibition has caused gang warfare and other violent crimes by raising the prices of drugs so much that vicious criminals enter the market to make astronomical profits, and addicts rob and steal to get money to pay the inflated prices for their drugs.

"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.

We need to work on drug costs, and there's things we can work on on drug costs, especially Medicare Part D, to bring drug costs down.

Nobody tells the history of marijuana and its prohibition like Russ Belville does. He has a special talent for presenting scholarship in a remarkably engaging way. That’s why I turned to Russ when I needed someone to present on the subject to the annual staff retreat of the Drug Policy Alliance. And it’s why I repeatedly recommend him for speaking and media opportunities. He’s good!

Another California study counted 30,000 substance abusers who are pregnant are White woman. So, The Wire paints the picture of drug addiction, drug dealing, and drug abuse as being a specifically a Black issue.

By characterizing the use of illegal drugs as quasi-legal, state-sanctioned, Saturday afternoon fun, legalizers destabilize the societal norm that drug use is dangerous. They undercut the goals of stopping the initiation of drug use to prevent addiction.... Children entering drug abuse treatment routinely report that they heard that 'pot is medicine' and, therefore, believed it to be good for them.

The First Amendment of the US Constitution ... is an eloquent repudiation of the First Commandment's prohibition of religious freedom. It is also a repudiation of the Third Commandment's prohibition of freedom of speech. The Thirteenth Amendment repudiates the institution of slavery which is so cozily assumed by the Fourth and Tenth Protestant Commandments.

There is no evidence to show that prohibition has ever had its intended impact. Of course, just as banning beef has reduced beef consumption, banning alcohol will lead to reduced alcohol consumption. But, there appears to be little or no correlation between, say, domestic violence or household impoverishment and prohibition.

If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects?

AZT was never meant to treat HIV. It was meant to treat cancer and, when it was discovered to be toxic, the drug companies stopped clinic trials of the drug because it was so toxic. Is this drug really one we want to use?

I'm militantly anti-drug abuse but love everything Keith Richards and some other drug goofballs do.

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.

There is probably a promising drug candidate that has already been discovered for the treatment of Down syndrome that is sitting on the shelf of some drug company.

Liquor prohibition led to the rise of organized crime in America, and drug prohibition has led to the rise of the gang problems we have now.

The current prohibition laws are forcing drug disputes to be played out with guns in our streets. We need to put a stop to this criminal drug element in our country.

One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.

I'd like to promote lots of things. I'd like to promote elimination of drug prohibition. I'd like to promote parental choice in education through vouchers. Those are two things I think are very urgent and important. They're both more important than the harm which Social Security will do.

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?

...In the vast majority of drug experiments, it is not uncommon for none or one or two of hundreds of patients to benefit from the drug.

I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect.

[T]he truth is that drug addicts have a disease. It only takes a short time in the streets to realize that out-of-control addiction is a medical problem, not a form of recreational or criminal behavior. And the more society treats drug addiction as a crime, the more money drug dealers will make "relieving" the suffering of the addicts.

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.

In the 1990s - the period of the greatest escalation of the drug war - nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least, if not more, prevalent in middle class white neighborhoods and college campuses as it is in the 'hood.

I was a drug dealer in Ibiza at 15. I did not excel in drug dealing - I was terrible at it. Golden rule with drug dealing - don't get too enthusiastic with your own merchandise.

Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself

When we finally decide that drug prohibition has been no more successful than alcohol prohibition, the drug dealers will disappear.

Just as the process of repealing national alcohol prohibition began with individual states repealing their own prohibition laws, so individual states must now take the initiative with respect to repealing marijuana prohibition laws.

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.

I'm not guilty. You're the one that's guilty. The lawmakers, the politicians, the Colombian drug lords, all you who lobby against making drugs legal. Just like you did with alcohol during Prohibition. You're the one who's guilty. I mean, c'mon, let's kick the ballistics here: ain't no Uzi's made in Harlem. Not one of us in here owns a poppy field. This thing is bigger than Nino Brown. This is big business. This is the American way.

Wouldn't you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict?