Sal Albanese Quotes

I would equate the legalization of drugs to the moral equivalent of genocide.

The consumption of drugs could be legalized, not penalized.

The war on drugs is a war against the communities.

You look at any culture, and prohibition has invariably been an unmitigated failure. It is just idiotic to criminalise any substance, I think.

I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal

We cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.

There is absolutely no difference between alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition except the drug being prohibited.

What governments decide is illegal is not always based on science. Drugs that are legal cause at least as much damage, if not more, than drugs that are illicit.

Certainly our democracy is not going to fall if you legalize marijuana.

Legalize it. Regulate it. Tax it... The arguments against marijuana today are the same as the arguments against liquor years ago.

Drug money, such as booze money during Prohibition, has corrupted countless police, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, border patrol agents, prosecutors and judges... Because illegal drugs are unregulated, their purity is unknowable -- accounting for thousands of overdose deaths and injuries... Let's stipulate that some unknown number of Americans will become addicts after legalization, who otherwise would not have. We must ask whether the terrible price we are now paying -- in police costs, international drug control efforts, border security, foregone tax revenue, overdose deaths, corruption and violence -- is worth it.

I really believe that we should treat marijuana like we treat beverage alcohol…. The War on Drugs is not working.

When we finally decide that drug prohibition has been no more successful than alcohol prohibition, the drug dealers will disappear.

We won't dispassionately investigate or rationally debate which drugs do what damage and whether or how much of that damage is the result of criminalization. We'd rather work ourselves into a screaming fit of puritanism and then go home and take a pill.

We have not yet concluded that needle-exchange programs do not encourage drug use.

The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.

Our state's strategy on methamphetamine, and any other issue, is going to be a moving target.

We need to educate Americans about the real harms of marijuana if we want to sustain the gains we've made over the past three years.

The President wishes the Japanese to be very prudent about the introduction of opium, and if a treaty is made, he wishes that opium may be strictly prohibited.

By bringing about a rational drug policy, we'd be freeing up a lot of resources for real crime. Drug disputes would get played out with courts rather than with guns. So it would make this country a much better place overnight.

Our communities face many challenges, from keeping our kids safe in public, to the war on terrorism. But few have such immediate consequences as we face from methamphetamine.

It is about time that we develop a worldwide strategy to reduce illegal trade in meth and its precursor chemicals and stop the devastating impact that methamphetamine use is having on our children and our communities.

If grass were legalized, it would help our drug problem enormously.

I just think it's shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of controlled substance.

For all our policing, we understand that law enforcement is not the solution to the problem of drugs in our society.