Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it.
— Mark Twain
Memorable War On Drugs quotations
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.
The War on Drugs employs millions - politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and now the military - that probably couldn't find a place for their dubious talents in a free market, unless they were to sell pencils from a tin cup on street corners.
It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom.
Once brave politicians and others explain the war on drugs' true cost, the American people will scream for a cease-fire. Bring the troops home, people will urge. Treat drugs as a health problem, not as a matter for the criminal justice system.
Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs
The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.
The war on drugs was an ideology the government came up with, and there never really was a war on drugs. I mean, to stop the importation of drugs into the United States of America is an impossibility.
I'm actually not in favour of decriminalizing cannabis - I'm in favour of legalizing it. Tax and regulate. It's one of the only ways to keep it out of the hands of our kids because the current war on drugs, the current model isn't working.
Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself
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?
You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks.
The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to.
If you say, "Would there were no wine" because of the drunkards, then you must say, going on by degrees, "Would there were no steel," because of the murderers, "Would there were no night," because of the thieves, "Would there were no light," because of the informers, and "Would there were no women," because of adultery.
I loved when Bush came out and said, 'We are losing the war against drugs.
' You know what that implies? There's a war being fought, and the people on drugs are winning it.
The war on drugs has failed in West Africa and around the world
Today, we must acknowledge, that war has not been won.
I'm finding myself really angry over spending and the deficit.
I'm finding myself really angry over what's happening in the Middle East, the decision to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. I'm angry about cap and trade. And I've been on record for a long time on the failed war on drugs.
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
The War on Drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws.
American exceptionalism? Exceptional at what? Waging wars against innocent people for fake reasons? Exceptional at what? Being addicted to pharmaceutical drugs that have people's minds wasted? Exceptional at what? Eating more junk food and becoming the most obese nation on Earth?
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
People lose their lives in the drug wars and you don't have to prove it to yourself because others have proved it for you.
Just as Hitler used the Reichstag burning, the U.
S. government now uses the so-called two wars, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, to fuel fear in the population and establish a police security state.
While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty.
Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.
We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong.
.. There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them.
If we act together on the drug problem, with a comprehensive vision devoid of ideological or political biases, we will be able to prevent much harm and violence!
We are losing the 'War on Drugs,' which means there's a war going on and people on drugs are winning it.
America's drug war is so stupid that if you pay close attention to just how stupid it is -- it'll drive you to use drugs.
The drug war is a holocaust in slow motion.
Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were
Other men's sins are before our eyes; our own are behind our backs.
If we have a bitcoin universe, you don't get to print money for war.
You don't get to have money for a prison/industrial complex. You don't get money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people.