Ayelet Waldman Quotes

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.

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

Defenders of the system will counter by saying this drug war has been aimed at violent crime. But that is not the case. The overwhelming majority of people arrested in the drug war have been arrested for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses.

Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction.

"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."

We need to take a hard look at the war on drugs and the number of non-violent offenders who end up getting their lives destroyed by going to prison. We need to look at mandatory minimum sentencing and give judges more flexibility when there are issues of drug abuse or addiction.

My goal is to end mass incarceration and change the laws to stop locking up low-level, nonviolent drug charges. Stop charging drug addicts as criminals.

If we had probably a repeal of most of the federal laws on drugs and the unfairness on how Blacks are treated with these drugs laws, it would be a tremendous improvement.

It's not just the over $8 billion that we would be saving in law enforcement; it's also the over $8 billion that we would be making by taxing marijuana... We are filling our jails with nonviolent drug offenders -- predominantly young, predominantly African American... It's a great beyond left and right issue. It has support across the political spectrum and also the support of the majority of the American people.

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.

The war on drugs has been the engine of mass incarceration. Drug convictions alone constituted about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system's most dramatic expansion.

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

There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.

Three strikes' laws make no sense as policy. They are more about the politicians responding to the people's desire to see their fury at social dysfunction reflected in the law. Our sentences are way too long. We need to look at the war on drugs, which is to say we need to look and this is easier said than done. Once again, politically, not an easy lift at all. Nevertheless, our policy is self-defeating. We're not keeping people from using the substances. We're creating a huge black market, just like we did under prohibition, which attracts all kinds of criminal enterprise.

It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.

I was a federal public defender during the most important years of the drug war. I saw people go to jail for nothing, and go to jail for a long time.

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

The War on Drugs is a war on people, but particularly it's been a war on low-income people and a war on minorities. We know in the United States of America there is no difference in drug use between black, white and Latinos. But if you're Latino in the United States of America, you're about twice as likely to be arrested for drug use than if you're white. If you're black, you are about four times as likely to be arrested if you're African American than if you are white. This drug war has done so much to destroy, undermine, sabotage families, communities, neighborhoods, cities.

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

Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.

The drug war is a holocaust in slow motion.

Justified by the war on drugs, the United States is in the midst of a prison binge made obvious by the fact that since 1970, the number of people behind bars... has increased 600 percent.

By creating false environment of a war on drugs, and cruel and unusual punishment with these crimes, 50% of our U.S. population is in jail without having hurt anybody, mostly for drugs.

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.

Drugs have destroyed many lives, but wrongheaded governmental policies have destroyed many more. I think it's obvious that after 40 years of war on drugs, it has not worked. There should be decriminalization of drugs.