All Quotes

"It's the money, stupid. After 33 years as a police officer in three of the country's largest cities, that is my message to the righteous politicians who obstinately proclaim that a war on drugs will lead to a drug-free America. About $500 of heroin or cocaine in a source country will bring in as much as $100,000 on the streets of an American city. All the cops, armies, prisons and executions in the world cannot impede a market with that kind of tax-free profit-margin. It is the illegality that permits the obscene mark-up, enriching drug-traffickers, distributors, dealers, crooked cops, lawyers, judges, politicians, bankers, businessmen."

"The decades-long draconian approach of the international community to preventing drug dependence is now widely recognised to have been a human disaster, both in the failure to tackle the primary issue and for the additional human suffering caused, including the patients in moderate to severe pain who have been prevented from accessing essential medicines. We need politicians and policymakers to be courageous enough to admit that past policies were misguided, and to rebalance their priorities and approaches in ways that will reduce human suffering."

"Congress should definitely consider decriminalizing possession of marijuana... We should concentrate on prosecuting the rapists and burglars who are a menace to society."

"I remember when the U.S. had a drug problem and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore."

"Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong — and demonstrably more destructive — for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost."

"Importantly, there is nothing in the Constitution — by which, under Article 6, Section 2, officials at every level of government are obligated to abide — that authorizes the banning of any substance or enforcing that ban with the threat of injury, incarceration, or death. The lawful powers of the federal government are enumerated in Article 1, Section 8, and they do not include forbidding drugs or any other substance. Politicians early in the 20th century understood this, and passed a Constitutional amendment allowing them to outlaw alcohol. No such amendment has ever been passed, or even proposed, with regard to drugs."

"The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs."

"Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person."

"Called "Rauschgiftbekaempfung," The Combatting of Drugs, the term also acquired a more popular meaning closer to 'War on Dope.' This extremely cruel and often arbitrary prohibitionist campaign of National Socialist racial hygiene can be viewed as a precursor to the U.S. War on Drugs, which is itself busily mobilizing the entire police state to root out the demonized forces of foreign 'narco-terrorism' threatening the performance principle of Late Capital's global sweat shop."

"... while we might feel intuitively opposed to changing the law so as to decriminalize drug use, the issue may seem wholly different if we think about it in the Portuguese context, where this change has already been implemented and followed by significant reductions in HIV infections and opiate-related deaths. When considered from this perspective, it seems highly unreasonable to support a change back to the previous condition."

"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."

"Sundays observe; think when the bells do chime, 'T is angels' music."

"The centerpiece of the cultural counterrevolution is the snowballing campaign for a "drug-free workplace" — a euphemism for "drug-free workforce," since urine testing also picks up for off-duty indulgence. The purpose of this '80s version of the loyalty oath is less to deter drug use than to make people undergo a humiliating ritual of subordination: "When I say pee, you pee." The idea is to reinforce the principle that one must forfeit one's dignity and privacy to earn a living, and bring back the good old days when employers had the unquestioned right to demand that their workers' appearance and behavior, on or off the job, meet management's standards."

"These debates gave rise to the notion of pharmacological Calvinism. As framed by Gerald Klerman, this notion referred to the fact that treatments which made the taker feel good, without hard work being required, are commonly perceived to be morally bad and are likely to be accompanied by some form of secular retribution."

"La Mettrie anticipated the outlines of the world into which we are now moving. In particular, he envisioned philosophical speculation withering once it became possible to intervene effectively at the biological level to change human behavior. At this point, physicians would replace philosophers as the arbiters of human ethics."

"Is there any doubt that drug addiction is an escape from an unbearable inner state - from a reality that one cannot deal with - from an atrophying mind one can never fully destroy? If Apollonian reason were unnatural to man, and Dionysian intuition brought him closer to nature and truth, the apostles of irrationality would not have to resort to drugs. Happy, self-confident men do not seek to get stoned. Drug addiction is the attempt to obliterate one's consciousness, the quest for a deliberately-induced insanity. As such, it is so obscene and evil that any doubt about the moral character of its practitioners is itself an obscenity."

"There are those who are so tightly meshed within physical reality that the soul is squeezed dry. They are tight, sore, and chafing beneath too-severe habits and ideas. For them momentary release, such as the drugs can give is highly beneficial."

"If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes."

"The popular medical formulation of morality that goes back to Ariston of Chios, "virtue is the health of the soul," would have to be changed to become useful, at least to read: "your virtue is the health of your soul." For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the "equality of men," the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men. Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul."

"Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness—even for the sake of our virtue—and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness."

"As our experience with drug education has developed and been charted, it has become apparent that effective efforts need to be comprehensive. A classroom teacher's efforts must be reinforced by school wide drug abuse prevention activities, and these must in turn be supported by interventions in all aspects of community life. Furthermore, it is not enough merely to address the surface issue of drug use behavior; we must also address the environmental circumstances that contribute to such problems. This complex issue presents a great challenge to drug educators, but it also calls for a restructuring, sometimes called a paradigm shift, of many of our social institutions and the way they interact. For example, faith-based organizations are generally uninvolved in drug abuse prevention, except to condemn drug abuse. For them to have an organized and planned role in prevention will require a shift in their thinking about their goals and what type of programs they should sponsor. Establishing referral networks, service linkages, and collaborative relationships among community agencies and individuals is a difficult hurdle. Whether or not this is done, drug education professionals often do not know the long-term results of their work because the outcome occurs in the future, when educators no longer have contact with the objects of their efforts. Satisfaction may come from reviewing data trends as the years unfold, but this is not as gratifying as the immediate results that may come from participating in drug treatment of other kinds of human service work in which success is more immediately apparent. Of course, the flip side is that failure also is not recognized. Prevention efforts are repeated because they are well received or because of the inherent satisfaction of doing them. The fact that they have no impact may not be realized without careful evaluation. There has been a new push by the U.S. government to demand that state and local prevention programs, wen funded by state and federal dollars, be "science based." The expectation is that programs should show some evidence, prior to implementation, that they will actually affect youth drug use. The background to this effort is that enthusiasm and genuine concern for preventing adolescent drug abuse have often been translated into activities that are enjoyable but not carefully examined and tested. Schools have used funds to purchase t-shirts and ribbons, hire expensive motivational speakers, and to acquire videotapes and untested curriculum material without any assurance that such expenditures have led in the past, or will lead in the future, to decreases in youth drug use."

"Not only our well-being, but the well-being of our sons and grandsons depends on disseminating patterns of "sobriae ebrietas" (sober inebriation), which reconsider the use of psychedelic drugs as a moral and aesthetic challenge."

"I like the FedEx driver, because he's drug dealer and he don't even know it. And he's always on time!"

"All you kiddies remember to lay off the needle drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon."

"MDMA got you feeling like a champion, The city never sleeps better slip you a Ambien."

"The worst speak something good; if all want sense, God takes a text, and preacheth Pa-ti-ence."

"Lines 1-16."

"The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers -- common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons."

"Hiya kids. Here's an important message from your Uncle Bill. Don't buy drugs. Become a rock star, and they give you them for free!"

"Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation."

"In vino veritas."

"O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!"

"My head hurts, this shit isn't getting me high My chest is so tight, am I going to die? My stomachs in knots, as the room starts to spin As I wait for this Valium to slowly kick in."

"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge."

"This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel ... total lack of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue — severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it."

"You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug – especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes."

"A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole."

"Once a woman has given you her heart you can never get rid of the rest of her."

"Thinking is to me the greatest fatigue in the world."

"No man worth having is true to his wife, or can be true to his wife, or ever was, or ever will be so."

"Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation."

"When debtors once have borrowed all we have to lend, they are very apt to grow shy of their creditors' company."

"He laughs best who laughs last."

"Much of a muchness."

"The want of a thing is perplexing enough, but the possession of it is intolerable."

"As if a woman of education bought things because she wanted 'em."

"Knowledge is folly unless grace guide it."

"To write a verse or two is all the praise That I can raise."

"Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie."

"Like summer friends, Flies of estate and sunneshine."