Charles A. Gruber Quotes

You can't expect law enforcement to provide the solution to the drug problem.

We cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.

The drug problem in this country is a consumption issue.

We have lost the War on Drugs. We cannot arrest our way out of it….It’s a public health problem, not a crime problem.

We know the war on drugs will not be won in Washington DC When the United States of America decides it wants to do something and the people pull together, amazing things can be done.

Drug education is the only vaccine we have against the danger of drug abuse of our children.

We cannot conceive of a society that is worth building ... on the basis of a drug culture.

We are never going to lick this problem of the drug traffic until we get the addicts off the streets of this country. They have got to be taken off the streets

For 40 years we have been looking for ways to make the existence of the narcotic drug addict just as tough as possible. For 40 years we have asked only what new penalties, what new police tech-niques, might make it easier to catch him and lock him up, whether as an ordinary criminal or, more recently, in connection with some more or less sincere efforts at rehabilitation in confinement. I believe that this entire approach is open to grave question as a practical matter

We need to repeal the whole war on drugs. It isn’t working. We have already spent over $400 billion since the early 1970s, and it is wasted money

The war on drugs is a war on our own families …. We have to move from a system that punishes to a system that treats.

The problem of drugs is a national failure. We do not grow cocoa leaves in Albany.

The effect of the [opium prohibition] edict was electrical. Farmers stopped cultivation with little resistance. Smokers abandoned the habit by millions; it became unfashionable to smoke in public; and the young were constrained not to acquire the habit…

The Drug War has arguably been the single most devastating, dysfunctional social policy since slavery.

Asking South American peasants to stop growing coca is like asking the Scots to stop growing barley because people on the other side of the world could not hold their drink.

Until we do something about demand, Latin America will never be able to solve the drug problem on its own.

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

The Drug War is probably the worst scourge that has ever been visited upon this country.

The real drug "kingpin" is the user. It is the casual users who create the profits. But we can't put them all in prison; there isn't any room in the jails.

Drugs are destroying more people than poverty ever did.

Alcohol and other drug problems are community problems and must be solved by communities in partnership with government.

Should someone go to jail for just doing drugs? I believe the time has come for that to end.

To become a narcotic addict is an anti-social act and the foundation of countermeasures against addiction is to treat and rehabilitate addicts.

Your Majesty has not before been thus officially notified, and you may plead ignorance of the severity of our laws, but I now give my assurance that we mean to cut this harmful drug forever.

People who need [drug abuse] treatment have got to get it. You don't have to be a humanitarian to believe addicts need treatment. The public is threatened every time a drug addict is told to come back next week.