Mahershala Ali Quotes

After spending three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U.S. government's responsibility for the drug problems in South Central Los Angeles and other inner cities is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Crack has destroyed more families than poverty.

You might go into 'Dope' feeling you already know what this movie is because, all right, there's kids, they're from Inglewood, oh, it's drugs.

The real problems are cultural. The problems of the people who take drugs as a cultural trap - I think there's a real problem there, the crack stuff, the hopelessness of the junkie. The urban angst.

I think when you have Baltimore, which in the first night was practically wiped out or brought back 30 years. Because the police were instructed to stand down. You can't let that happen.

If the price of the drug people want to use is through the roof, well then they're going to have to commit crimes to get the money to get the drug. You don't see any crimes committed over a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer, do you?

Drug addiction is tearing our communities and our country apart, and until we decide we're going to think differently about it, until we decide that we're going to invest as a country in prevention and treatment, until we decide that as individuals we're going to step up and do our part to address this epidemic, we're not going to solve this.

Folks can look at this issue and read it and it can feel like medicine, it can feel epidemic. We wanted this to hit people in their gut, and the hope is that by doing that, we can get more people to think more deeply about these issues.

I just thought everybody lived around abandoned buildings and crack-heads, ... I lived in the ghetto until I was like 19. I came to Los Angeles, stayed at hotels and stuff. When I got back and I saw what my neighborhood looked like, I started getting scared.

East St. Louis-which the local press refers to as "an inner city without an outer city"-has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66 cities in Illinois, East St. Louis ranks first in fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant health.

The neighborhoods I grew up in were poor and full of drug users. I don't think you have to look that hard to find those kinds of lives. But I also don't think you have to have experienced it really close to be able to empathize.

I don't know a family that isn't touched by some sort of addiction.

I've lost over 800 West Virginians the last year. Lost their lives to opiate and drug addiction. This is something that we've got to fight. We need to have treatment centers that take care of people. We need to start basically education from kindergarten all the way through adulthood. We need to get involved and stop this epidemic that's going on that's just ravaging.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

Oh yeah In France a skinny man Died of a big disease with a little name By chance his girlfriend came across a needle And soon she did the same At home there are seventeen-year-old boys And their idea of fun Is being in a gang called The Disciples High on crack, totin' a machine gun.

We have reached a point where the value we do add to our economy is now being outweighed by the value we are removing, not only from future generations in terms of diminished resources, but from ourselves in terms of unlivable cities, deadening jobs, deteriorating health, and rising crime. In biological terms, we have become a parasite and are devouring our host.

In the '70s, everybody thought drugs were just good times. People didn't really know about drug addiction, or that such a thing existed. When I grew up in the '70s I thought you had to take drugs. It was almost like I didn't think you had a choice.

I was like one of those newspapers, those periodicals. There's all different kinds of alcoholics. There's the everyday kind: that's the consistent one. That's what people think an alcoholic is-but an alcoholic is basically just someone who's allergic to alcohol. That's all it means. It's just an allergy.

Only a complete alcoholic can think life is funny ... any life!.

If you're a first-responder in Missouri as part of a fire department, you're three times more likely to respond to a drug overdose than you are a fire. So it's a problem. I don't know exactly what the right number is, but certainly I think members of the Senate and House are rightly concerned about it.

Seeing is believing to most families who have lived with a drinker.

I heard about crack on the news and I was like, "Oh, that's what the niggas must be doing." And when I kept coming outside, I was doing my own little jostlin' to get my money.

America is becoming a drug infested nation. Drugs are becoming cheaper than candy bars. We are not going to let it happen any longer.