Pat Robertson Quotes

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

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.

We're already going down that path with illegal drug use and incarceration. I can't imagine it getting any worse.

Why do we put people who are on drugs in jail? They're sick, they're not criminals. Sick people don't get healed in prison. You see? It makes no sense.

I go to correctional facilities and talk to kids there. They have little kids in there who are, like, 12 years old, stealing cars and stuff like that.

I always thought a very strong anti-drug policy was a good thing for my union members.

Casual drug users should be taken out and shot.

If its not worth spending everything it takes, it's not a war [on drugs].

Agitating the community and increasingly forcing itself upon our attention is the narcotic drug evil. I am convinced that part of the agitation on this subject is due to the sensationalism of certain types of newspapers and magazines. Lurid, sensational articles, intended to inflame the imagination of young people and to make the whole subject mysteriously and morbidly attractive, have led to the prevalence of a belief that the use of narcotic drugs is much more general than it really is.

The consumption of drugs could be legalized, not penalized.

[We have to make] a distinction between dangerous violent criminals and people who are engaged in non-violent criminal activities….Your taking somebody out of the economy, breaking up their families, and putting them in a place with hardened criminals. I think that it is pretty hard to argue that has been a positive long-term result.

Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder.

You can either be in the Ron Paul tradition and say there's nothing wrong with heroin and cocaine, or you can be in the tradition that says, 'These kind of addictive drugs are terrible; they deprive you of full citizenship, and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American.'

What I support is a whole different approach with regard to drug use, and that is spending less money on the prosecution and incarceration side and more money on prevention and education, which I know works.

If drugs are bad, any respectable society should do something to deal with them.

Drugs nearly killed my brother when he was a young man and I hate them. He fought back. And I'm really proud of him. But I learned something in going through that long nightmare with our family. And I can tell you, something has happened to some of our young people. They simply don't think these drugs are dangerous anymore. Or they think the risk is acceptable.

Jail and the streets go hand in hand. You can't have one with out the other. They coincide.

I am fed up with a system which busts the pot smoker and lets the big dope racketeer go free.

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

I sit on the Drug Policy Subcommittee of the United States Congress. I'm on the speaker's task force. This is something people would rather turn away from and not face, but in fact it is possibly the greatest threat we face.

In recent years, we have been sending a clear, consistent signal about the harms of drugs, particularly marijuana, which for most young people is the first illegal drug that they are exposed to.

It became much more complicated politically to work with psychedelics because of the unsupervised experimentation with psychedelics, particularly among young people.

I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.