Drugs

"To smoke a cigar through a mouthpiece is equivalent to kissing a lady through a respirator."

"Dick Stoype Was a dear friend and lover of the pipe. He used to say one pipe of Wishart's best Gave life a zest. To him 'twas meat and drink and physic, To see the friendly vapor Curl round his midnight taper, And the black fume Clothe all the room, In clouds as dark as sciences metaphysic."

"A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can you want?"

"Lastly, the ashes left behind, May daily show to move the mind, That to ashes and dust return we must: Then think, and drink tobacco."

"Ashore it's wine, women and song; aboard it's rum, bum and bacca."

"Capitalism"

"Imperialism"

"Alcoholic beverages"

"Lung cancer"

"Tobacco industry"

"I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say "Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!" I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds."

"I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me."

"Dope gets you through times with no money better than money gets you through times with no dope."

"That is not a drug. It's a leaf."

"There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it’s a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I’ve made the effort—successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do."

"You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists."

"The question arises, therefore, why cannabis is so regularly banned in countries where alcohol is permitted. [...] It may be that we can ban cannabis simply because the people who use it, or would do so, carry little weight in social matters and are relatively easy to control, whereas the alcohol user often carries plenty of weight in social matters and is difficult to control, as the U.S. prohibition era showed. It has yet to be shown, however, that the one is more socially or personally disruptive than the other."

"A young boy called up and asked me if I preferred grass or astroturf … And I told him that I had never smoked astroturf. I guess that I shouldn’t have said that."

"I smoke a fat pound of grass and fall on my ass faster than a fat bitch who sat down too fast!"

"When you smoke herb, herb reveal yourself to you. All the wickedness you do, the herb reveal itself to yourself, your conscience, show up yourself clear, because herb make you meditate. Is only a natural t'ing and it grow like a tree."

"One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness — the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others."

"I think that marijuana should not only be legal, I think it should be a cottage industry. It would be wonderful for the state of Maine. There's some pretty good homegrown dope. I'm sure it would be even better if you could grow it with fertilizers and have greenhouses."

"The fact that I got to be the CEO of a publicly traded company in the marijuana space, that was something that was completely unexpected. But very quickly, marijuana products medicinally compete with legal prescription drugs that statistically kill 100,000 people a year. There's not been one documented death due to marijuana. Then on the recreational side, I've always maintained that legalizing marijuana will lead to less overall substance abuse because people will find it as such a safer alternative than everything else that's out there, starting with alcohol."

"I've smoked marijuana, I choose not to smoke marijuana, but when I smoked it the first time, you know what I thought when I smoked it the first time? I thought, "the government lied." I just think that the government should tell the truth when it comes to these drugs. Look, marijuana is safer than alcohol, and don't trust me on this but the City of Denver, five years ago, voted on the decriminalization of marijuana on a campaign based on marijuana being safer than alcohol."

"I'm now firm in my belief that marijuana is a key ingredient to happiness for a great number of people. What kind of person prevents another's responsible pursuit of happiness? Not a very humane one."

"The main effects of smoking marijuana are contentment, relaxation, sedation, euphoria, and increased hunger, all peaking within five to fifteen minutes after smoking and lasting for about two hours...very high THC concentrations...can cause mild paranoia and visual and auditory distortions, but even these effects are rare and usually seen only in very inexperienced users."

"The perception that cannabis is a safe drug is a mistaken reaction to a past history of exaggeration of its health risks."

"The actual experience of the smoked herb has been clouded by a fog of dirty language perpetrated by a crowd of fakers who have not had the experience and yet insist on downgrading it. The paradoxical key to this bizarre impasse of awareness is precisely that the marijuana consciousness is one that, ever so gently, shifts the center of attention from habitual shallow, purely verbal guidelines and repetitive secondhand ideological interpretations of experience to more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute engagement with sensing phenomena."

"Not only is pot way cooler than alcohol, it’s also non-toxic. Dylan Thomas could not have smoked himself to death."

"It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users. Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons."

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

"As a source of illumination, ganga has become an instrument in the war against Babylon and Babylonian consciousness. Its use, therefore, plays a major role in the de-alienation and decolonization of the African mind."

"The Rastas, more than any other group, have elevated ganja to a central place in their religious practice and have developed a well-articulated ideology justifying its use and explaining its significance. ... Rastas regard the proscription of ganja use by Babylon's government as part of its strategy of social control."

"I had gotten caught with a shopping bag full of Marijuana, a shopping bag full of love - I was in love with the weed and I did not for one minute think that anything was wrong with getting high. I had been getting high for four or five years and was convinced, with the zeal of a crusader, that marijuana was superior to lush - yet the rulers of the land seemed all to be lushes. I could not see how they were more justified in drinking than I was in blowing the gage. I was a grasshopper, and it was natural that I felt myself to be unjustly prosecuted."

"I believe pot should be legalized (and Jack Daniels should always remain legal!)"

"HEMP, n. A plant from whose fibrous bark is made an article of neckwear which is frequently put on after public speaking in the open air and prevents the wearer from taking cold."

"You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses."

"For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it."

"Marijuana can act as the loosening agent, so that whatever has been banned from consciousness may come cascading forth. To uncover our deceptions without our usual rationalizations can be unpleasant, an experience that has turned many psychologically fragile individuals away from marijuana despite its therapeutic catharsis."

"Marijuana will not tolerate repression. Tranquillizers and depressants relax the body and release tension, but the state of mind associated with these drugs is "unconsciousness" whereby we escape rather than resolve our dilemmas. Alcoholism is an extreme need of both the body and personality sometimes to release the nervousness that has accumulated and continues to build up to an unbearable degree. It serves the same function for the collective personality for the society as well. A culture in which alcohol and tranquillizers are the prevalent form of release prefers not to witness internal confusion and actually chooses to act without conscious participation, maintaining a semi-numb condition."

"You must have been so high"

"You must have been high"

"I smoke two joints in the morning I smoke two joints at night I smoke two joints in the afternoon It makes me feel alright I smoke two joints in time of peace And two in time of war I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints And then I smoke two more"

"Panama Red, Panama Red He'll steal your woman, then he'll rob your head Panama Red, Panama Red On his white horse, Mescalito He come breezin' through town I'll bet your woman's up in bed with Panama Red"

"Let me get to the point Let's roll another joint Turn the radio loud I'm too alone to be proud."

"When the stress burns my brain just like acid raindrops, Mary Jane is the only thing that makes the pain stop."

"Excuse me while I light my spliff (spliff) Good God, I gotta take a lift (lift) From reality I just can't drift (drift) That's why I am staying with this riff (riff)"

"Let us burn one from end to end And pass it over to me my friend Burn it long, we'll burn it slow To light me up before i go"

"When you get a mouthful, That's Hot Lunch When you smoke a cashed bowl down too much You need to refill that with buds Fat-C, I only smoke fresh nugs."

"Weeping shades of indigo"