"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesPeople from New York CityAgnostics from the United StatesEconomists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Milton Friedman
1912 – 2006
US-amerikanischer Ökonom und Nobelpreisträger
216 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Milton Friedman →
Related Quotes
"Now, when anybody starts talking about this [an all-volunteer force] he immediately shifts language. My army is 'volu…"
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more r…"
"The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of s…"
"I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I'm right and he is wrong."
"Over the period covered by these data, a drastic change has occurred in the responsibilities undertaken by the state …"
"I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm f…"
"The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time. We never realize how we…"
"A largely parallel example involving human behavior has been used elsewhere by Savage and me. Consider the problem of…"
"If we are to use effectively these abstract models and this descriptive material, we must have a comparable explorati…"
"Make politics an avocation, not a vocation."