War On Drugs Quotes

The war on drugs is really the war on people who buy drugs from people who don't lobby the government.

The war on drugs has been a social and political failure. We need to encourage sport and stop encouraging drugs.

The war on drugs is a war against the communities.

We are losing the 'War on Drugs,' which means there's a war going on and people on drugs are winning it.

If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.

If we would end the war on drugs, you would see the end of the militarization of our police forces and you would see an end to a lot of the shooting violence that's going on when people are being pulled over for traffic stops and then suddenly executed right in the street.

The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.

More is spent in a single month [in the U.S.] fighting the war on drugs than all monies ever expended domestically or internationally fighting slavery from its inception. Per month, we spend more on the drug war than we ever have trying to free slaves.

The drug war is a holocaust in slow motion.

Geopolitical interests are behind the so-called war on drugs and terrorism.

The War on Drugs has failed - but it’s worse than that. It is actively harming our society. Violent crime is thriving in the shadows to which the drug trade has been consigned. People who genuinely need help can’t get it. Neither can people who need medical marijuana to treat terrible diseases. We are spending billions, filling up our prisons with non-violent offenders and sacrificing our liberties.

I say this as the president of the country which has suffered more deaths, more blood and more sacrifices in this war.

We join the call from other States from our region

Too many Americans have lost faith in our approach to the war on drugs.

Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly better than no drugs at all.

If you want to fight a war on drugs, sit down at your own kitchen table and talk to your own children.

I'm sad to see the passing of the great drug warriors. I certainly did my part in that battle and I don't regret any of it.

Drugs have destroyed many lives, but wrongheaded governmental policies have destroyed many more. I think it's obvious that after 40 years of war on drugs, it has not worked. There should be decriminalization of drugs.

Be not so bigoted to any custom as to worship it at the expense of truth.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

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.

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.

That's why you need the war on drugs to put all these pot smokers in prison so that the prisons remain full and the corporations remain profitable. It's a slippery slope.

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!

This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, not tolerate error as long as reason is left free to combat it.

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

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.

Marijuana legalization's income may help fund education, prevention and treatment programs for harder drugs. What's clear is that the four-decade-old U.S.-backed war on drugs is not working, and that it's producing tens of thousands of dead across the hemisphere, without significant gains in reducing consumption. Experimenting with new weapons to weaken the cartels may be better than doing nothing.

See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.

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.

That's what I hate about the war on drugs. All day long we see those commercials: "Here's your brain, here's your brain on drugs", "Just Say No", "Why do you think they call it dope?" … And then the next commercial is [singing] "This Bud's for yooouuuu." C'mon, everybody, let's be hypocritical bastards. It's okay to drink your drug. We meant those other drugs. Those untaxed drugs. Those are the ones that are bad for you.

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.

Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.

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.

We won't win until the average parent believes drug reform protects kids better than the war on drugs.

The war on drugs is wrong, both tactically and morally. It assumes that people are too stupid, too reckless, and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt.

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.

I really think we were charting a course to having a more sane response to mass incarceration, to drug use, and to understanding that the war on drugs has resulted only in the empowerment of vast criminal enterprises and the destruction of democracies around the world. And all that is coming to a miserable, horrific halt.

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.

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

I can't tell Black people to fight a war that is Israel's war. What kind of leader will you be, or should I be, to allow these babies Black, white and brown, to fight Israel's war, because Zionists dominate the government of the United States of America and her banking system.

I believe that the war on drugs is a tragically misplaced use of resources - an immoral venture that produces far more suffering than it alleviates.

If ur going to have a war on drugs, have them against ALL drugs, including alcohol, the number one offender.

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.

Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered. Harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses were passed by Congress in the 1980s as part of the war on drugs and the "get tough" movement, sentences that have helped to fuel our nation's prison boom and have also greatly aggravated racial disparities, particularly in the application of mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine.

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.

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

For those who say that the war on drugs and the system of mass incarceration really isn't about race, I say there is no way we would allow the majority of young white men to be swept into the criminal justice system for minor drug offenses, branded criminals and felons, and then stripped of their basis civil and human rights while young black men who are engaged in the same activity trot off to college. That would never be accepted as the norm.

If the Fed had a war on abortion like its war on poverty or war on drugs, within five years men would be having abortions!

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.