Top 78 Quotes About The Drug War
#2. The entire American media apparatus bought into the drug war - which is an enormously damaging and costly undertaking for this country - and there wasn't enough critical reporting about it and that's why it's gotten out of hand.
David Talbot
#3. The big lock-up is about drugs. Here's the real scam. The drug war is one of the games to get more convictions and prisoners.
Jerry Brown
#4. 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.
Michael Badnarik
#5. There is one-and only one-way to end the violence in Latin America. There is one-and only one-way to terminate the drug gangs. That way is by legalizing drugs. Legalizing drugs today would put an immediate end to the drug gangs and the drug-war violence.
Jacob G. Hornberger
#6. It would be a good time to replace the drug war with something more constructive. The cure offered the drug war today has probably been more harmful and done more damage than the disease.
George McGovern
#7. Viewed as a whole, the relevant research by cognitive and social psychologists to date suggests that racial bias in the drug war was inevitable, once a public consensus was constructed by political and media elites that drug crime is black and brown.
Michelle Alexander
#8. The drug war is a total scam, prescription drugs kill 300K a year, while marijuana kills no one, but they spend billions/year 'fighting' it, because pot heads make for good little slaves to put into private prisons, owned by the banks who launder the drug money, and it's ALL DOCUMENTED.
Alex E. Jones
#9. Devastation wrought by crack cocaine and the drug war, and the odd coincidence that an illegal drug crisis suddenly appeared in the black community after - not before - a drug war had been declared. In fact, the War on Drugs began at a time when illegal drug use was on the decline.
Michelle Alexander
#10. 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.
David Simon
#11. 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.
Mira Sorvino
#12. No matter what federal program one selects - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the drug war, the income tax and the IRS, education, foreign interventions and wars - they are all a giant mess.
Jacob G. Hornberger
#13. Major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.
Michelle Alexander
#14. I don't think drugs should be illegal. I'm not an advocate of everybody running out and using drugs, but I think the drug wars are not working, there's millions and millions of dollars being spent on the drug war that we're never going to win.
Sonny Barger
#15. It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war - it was part of the point.
Johann Hari
#16. The Drug War is an addiction, really.
Bill Maher
#17. State and local law enforcement agencies were granted the authority to keep, for their own use, the vast majority of cash and assets they seize when waging the drug war.
Michelle Alexander
#18. The drug war is a holocaust in slow motion.
David Simon
#19. 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?
Ralph Nader
#20. 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.
Milton Friedman
#21. The drug war has been a war where the direct casualties have primarily been America's poor; America's minorities; and often, unfortunately, America's vulnerable, in terms of people with disease and addiction and mental health.
Cory Booker
#22. Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it. More people should do acid. It should be sold over the counter.
George Carlin
#23. So when I say we had been the cowards, yes, that's what I meant, we as a society. And that's everybody, including myself. I had been screaming about the drug war and this war and other wars. I should have been more on terrorism, too. So should you, so should everybody.
Bill Maher
#26. With its brutal excesses and reliance on snitches and finks as informants, I don't think it's far off-kilter to describe the modern-day drug war as oddly similar to the Salem witch trials.
Joel Miller
#27. Geopolitical interests are behind the so-called war on drugs and terrorism.
Evo Morales
#28. The world of global drug production, shipping distribution, sales, and consumption is too complex, however, to be understood in any single us-and-them story.
John Gibler
#29. 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.
Stefan Molyneux
#30. I regret my El Chapo interview didn't spark debate about the war on drugs.
Sean Penn
#31. We won't win until the average parent believes drug reform protects kids better than the war on drugs.
Ethan Nadelmann
#32. Not only are we here to protect the public from vicious criminals in the street but also to protect the public from harmful ideas.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#33. Too many Americans have lost faith in our approach to the war on drugs ...
Gary Johnson
#34. To this day we seem to act in the world as though we know what's right for everybody.
Robert McNamara
#35. 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.
William S. Burroughs
#36. Look at all the drug busts all over the country. There must be an audience there somewhere. My feeling is that if we're losing the war on drugs, let's do a movie for the enemy.
Tommy Chong
#37. What was happening was the war on drugs. That was the primary culprit I could see that was getting in the way of black progress.
Eugene Jarecki
#38. The war on drugs has failed in West Africa and around the world
Kofi Annan
#39. In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.
Christopher Hitchens
#40. Guatemala commends the visionary decision of the citizens of Colorado and Washington
Otto Perez Molina
#41. The difference between a policy and a crusade is that a policy is judged by its results, while a crusade is judged by how good it makes its crusaders feel.
Thomas Sowell
#42. We wouldn't have much need of a war if people stopped using drugs. It's like taking up a fight against the use of headache remedies; it will never work until the condition causing people's headache pain is healed.
Chris Prentiss
#43. The President's budget pays for only six months of the war in Iraq and completely overlooks the transition costs of Social Security reform. The Administration always lied about the cost of the Medicare drug bill.
Jim Cooper
#44. You have to understand that we've had more than 40 years now of massively financed propaganda called the 'War on Drugs'.
Graham Hancock
#45. The fact is that a lot of the spending increases came during the Bush administration. Two unpaid for wars we got ourselves engaged in. A prescription drug plan that added enormous amounts to our spending, and the tax cuts at the high end that did not create jobs and create revenue coming.
Nancy Pelosi
#46. All drugs should be legal. War is wrong. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. Thank you. I'll be here all week.
Bill Hicks
#47. So much for the crusade against drugs ... all America is actually doing is consolidating its position as the biggest dealer in addictive and lethal substances on the planet, waging war on all rivals, whether they take the form of the Thai domestic tobacco industry or the Colombian cocaine cartels.
Alexander Cockburn
#48. Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.
George Orwell
#50. We cannot continue doing the same thing and expect different results
Otto Perez Molina
#51. Drug use is a primordial animal activity. Among humans , it is immemorial and nearly universal. VVhat then accounts for the 'war on drugs
Anonymous
#52. So long as mankind shall continue to lavish more praise upon its destroyers than upon its benefactors war shall remain the chief pursuit of ambitious minds.
Edward Gibbon
#53. People like to come up to me and tell me that I've got nice ink. Except these tattoos aren't just decorations. They are declarations. Every tattoo I have tells its own story about who I am. Drug-free. Honor. And a war against the system.
CM Punk
#54. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#55. The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.
Chris Hedges
#56. It would be as if the Navy Seals defected from the U.S. Army to help the Crips take over Los Angeles
and succeeded.
Johann Hari
#57. The war on drugs is really no war at all - it's a business!
Jerry Brown
#58. Propaganda must not serve the truth, especially as it might bring out something favorable for the opponent.
Adolf Hitler
#59. The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug - and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs.
Johann Hari
#60. I never use the word "drug" without defining it. I define it exactly the way the DEA defines it, "a chemical compound capable of reproduction in standardized dosages." I explain that marijuana is a plant with many drugs in it, just like any other plant.
Carl E. Olson
#61. It is not only the juror's right, but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the instruction of the court.
John Adams
#62. If the obstacles of bigotry and priestcraft can be surmounted, we may hope that common sense will suffice to do everything else.
Thomas Jefferson
#63. In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined.
Laurie Garrett
#64. Since we're living with antibiotic drugs and chlorinated water and antibacterial soap and all these factors in our contemporary lives that I'd group together as a 'war on bacteria,' if we fail to replenish [good bacteria], we won't effectively get nutrients out of the food we're eating.
Sandor Katz
#65. We know nothing of what will happen in future, but by the analogy of experience.
Abraham Lincoln
#66. Why are drugs so profitable? Essentially, many argue, it's because they are illegal. By making drugs a criminal enterprise, it creates an enormous black market economy where drugs fetch far greater prices than they would if legal.
James Morcan
#67. 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.
Rodney S. Quinn
#68. Right here, in this same headquarters, 52 years ago, the Convention that gave the birth certificate to the war on drugs was approved
Juan Manuel Santos
#69. The oppression of a majority is detestable and odious; the oppression of a minority is only by one degree less detestable and odious.
William E. Gladstone
#70. It turns out that in the year following the 9/11 attacks, despite all the talk of terrorism and war, the average person was more likely to kill himself than to be killed by a terrorist, a soldier or a drug dealer. In
Yuval Noah Harari
#71. What drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has
David Simon
#72. There's as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.
Morris Sheppard
#73. I can't even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don't even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.
Charles Bowden
#74. Mexico has made a mistake. Alone, it fights a war against a global phenomenon that only matters to a few. That makes the headlines in every case because of its unusual cruelty.
Sabina Berman
#75. 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!
Juan Manuel Santos
#76. What drugs haven't destroyed, the war against them has
David Simon
#77. The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don't fold.
Yoon Ha Lee
#78. Clear now that she was as dependent as any addict on the drug of the war. He had underestimated the damage in her.
Tatjana Soli
