The War On Drugs Quotes

#1. Fighting aging is like the War on Drugs. It's expensive, does more harm than good, and has been proven to never end.

Amy Poehler

#2. The war on drugs is what makes thugs.

John McWhorter

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

Ethan Nadelmann

#4. I regret my El Chapo interview didn't spark debate about the war on drugs.

Sean Penn

#5. 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

#6. I was trying in 'The Power of the Dog' to write a brutally accurate in-your-face, if you will, description of 30 years in the war on drugs. And the effect that that had on people.

Don Winslow

#7. When you ask people, "What's America's longest war?" they usually answer "Vietnam" or amend that to "Afghanistan," but it's neither. America's longest war is the war on drugs.

Don Winslow

#8. The war on drugs is being lost on a daily basis.

Rhys Ifans

#9. The war on drugs is a war against the communities.

Holly Near

#10. Art can't decide whether the War on Drugs is an obscene absurdity or an absurd obscenity. In either case, it's a tragic, bloody farce.

Don Winslow

#11. But anyone who believes in the war on drugs is missing a crucial point as to why the war can never be won. Feeling good will never go out of style.

Ryan Vanderford

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

Stefan Molyneux

#13. The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.

Michelle Alexander

#14. The war on drugs has failed in West Africa and around the world

Kofi Annan

#15. 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

#16. You have to understand that we've had more than 40 years now of massively financed propaganda called the 'War on Drugs'.

Graham Hancock

#17. Media censorship is a prohibition of words and pictures. The war on drugs is a complete failure, and so is the American war on words. When you forbid a word, you give it power. Self-proclaimed rebels will use words like shit or fuck, simply to shock and sound cool.

Oliver Markus

#18. 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.

David Harsanyi

#19. The War on Drugs employs millions - politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and now the military - that probably couldn't find a place for their dubious talents in a free market, unless they were to sell pencils from a tin cup on street corners.

L. Neil Smith

#20. Most people assume the War on Drugs was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods.

Michelle Alexander

#21. I actually took them all on quite handily, although I learned when I came to study the issue that I was completely wrong. I also came to believe that the war on drugs is one of the last vestiges of institutionalized racism in our society.

Harvey Pekar

#22. Just as Hitler used the Reichstag burning, the U.S. government now uses the so-called two wars, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, to fuel fear in the population and establish a police security state.

Ralph Metzner

#23. 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

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

Gary Johnson

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

Bill Hicks

#26. I think it is now widely understood that the so-called "War on Drugs" has largely been a failure. Too many people have developed criminal records for smoking marijuana. Too many people have gone to jail for nonviolent crimes. So I think it's important for us to rethink the war on drugs.

Bernie Sanders

#27. The war on drugs was an ideology the government came up with, and there never really was a war on drugs. I mean, to stop the importation of drugs into the United States of America is an impossibility.

George Jung

#28. The war on drugs is really no war at all - it's a business!

Jerry Brown

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

Steven Machat

#30. 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

#31. 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.

Larry Elder

#32. Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs

Michelle Alexander

#33. Drug use is a primordial animal activity. Among humans , it is immemorial and nearly universal. VVhat then accounts for the 'war on drugs

Anonymous

#34. 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.

Larry Elder

#35. 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

#36. If you support the war on drugs in its present form, then you're only paying lip-service to the defense of freedom, and you don't really grasp the concept of the sovereign individual human being.

Neal Boortz

#37. The war on drugs thrives on ignorance of drugs and misplaced faith in the power of the law to regulate human vice.

Tom Feiling

#38. In the War on Drugs, shoot heroin first.

Eric Beeny

#39. I am here because I am the first judge in this country to say, in 1990, that the war on drugs was racist. It still is and that hasn't changed

Pamela Alexander

#40. 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

#41. The war on drugs to me is absolutely phoney, its so obviously phoney, ok? It's a war against our civil rights, that's all it is. They're using it to make us afraid to go out at night, afraid of each other, so that we lock ourselves in our homes and they get suspending our rights one by one.

Bill Hicks

#42. The War on Drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws.

Barack Obama

#43. You ever wonder why an East Eng girl like me hasn't got much in the way of family? Well here's the reasons Petra. World War 1. World War 2. Falklands War. Gulf War 1. Gulf War 2 and the War on Drugs. You can take your pick because I've lost whole bloody chunks of my family in all of them.

Chris Cleave

#44. The War on Drugs and the War on Homelessness are on a collision course that no one in the media or in public life are willing to acknowledge. Ostensibly aimed at decreasing the use of illegal drugs, the War on Drugs succeeds only in increasing homelessness.

Thomas Szasz

#45. "On what motivated Colorado voters: "Let's face it, the War on Drugs was a disaster. It may be well intentioned ... but it sent millions of kids to prison, gave them felonies often times when they had no violent crimes ... I was against this, but I can see why so many people supported it."

John Hickenlooper

#46. 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.

Gary Johnson

#47. The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything - on terrorism, drugs, even poverty - has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be?

Glenn Greenwald

#48. Although our war on drugs must be fortified with the best laws, enforcement efforts and resources, we would not be successful without your individual commitment to this cause.

Mel Carnahan

#49. In fact, most of what they're calling crime is a kid caught with a joint in his pocket. Why do people think of that as the problem?

Noam Chomsky

#50. 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

#51. What do you want? Where's the goddamn ice I ordered? Where's the booze? There's a war on, man! People are being killed!

Hunter S. Thompson

#52. 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

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

Evo Morales

#54. I loved when Bush came out and said, 'We are losing the war against drugs.'
You know what that implies? There's a war being fought, and the people on drugs are winning it.

Bill Hicks

#55. In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.

Christopher Hitchens

#56. 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

#57. Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were.

Tony Hillerman

#58. 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

#59. 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!

Harry Browne

#60. We should demand that (Customs and Border Protection) focus on the true priority that we face on the war on terror ... Stripping small amounts of prescription drugs from the hands of seniors ... that should not be a priority.

David Vitter

#61. I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol. I've never used marijuana and I don't intend to, but it's just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn't succeeded.

Pat Robertson

#62. All too often the people of our culture think they're really doing something if they're out there fighting bad things and getting laws passed. Just look at what we've accomplished by outlawing drugs and waging a trillion-dollar War on Drugs! (Nothing!)

Daniel Quinn

#63. What drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has

David Simon

#64. American exceptionalism? Exceptional at what? Waging wars against innocent people for fake reasons? Exceptional at what? Being addicted to pharmaceutical drugs that have people's minds wasted? Exceptional at what? Eating more junk food and becoming the most obese nation on Earth?

Gerald Celente

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

Bill Hicks

#66. I'm actually not in favour of decriminalizing cannabis
I'm in favour of legalizing it. Tax and regulate. It's one of the only ways to keep it out of the hands of our kids because the current war on drugs, the current model isn't working,

Justin Trudeau

#67. These are busy times for the Border Patrol, the customs agents, immigration folks; but if we are going to send these agencies to fight a war on drugs, to fight a war against illegal behavior, we have to send them the proper tools.

Bob Filner

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. The United States is using its war on drugs as an excuse to expand its control over Latin America.

Evo Morales

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

Tupac Shakur

#73. War on Drugs...will only be won when we point our thumbs at ourselves and ask the hard question: "How am I contributing to this problem?

David W. Earle

#74. Going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we'd turned out to be a Trojan horse. The 'Fab Four' moved right to the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that's when they started dropping us.

John Lennon

#75. This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on the poor. This is a war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and the invisible,

Don Winslow

#76. I found that I was getting a warm reception for my message of freeing you from the income tax, releasing you from Social Security, ending the insane war on drugs, restoring gun rights, and reducing the federal government to just its constitutional functions.

Harry Browne