John Hickenlooper Quotes

The War on Drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws.

Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself

The war on drugs has gone on for about forty-five, fifty years - and it's been a complete failure. If you had a business that was failing so badly, you would change course. And it's just incredible that governments continue along the same course.

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

Don't you think it would be better to legalize victimless crimes like drugs & prostitution & divert the resources to more important things like the rapes & assaults & things like that?

We should decriminalize all drugs. The assumptions on which our drug policies are based are flawed.

Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.

There is absolutely no good reason – medical or law enforcement – that marijuana should not be legal.

The current dominant opinion supporting the war on drugs in general, and our anti-marijuana laws in particular, is reminiscent of the opinion that supported the nationwide ban on alcohol consumption when I was a student. While alcoholic beverages are now regarded as ordinary articles of commerce, their use was then condemned with the same moral fervor that now supports the war on drugs.

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

… in light of the president's newfound boldness in speaking out about the unfairness of marijuana prohibition enforcement, he should take the opportunity to significantly reform federal marijuana policy and rearrange the agencies that have mismanaged it for so long.

Letting states legalize marijuana would free federal law enforcement resources for the more urgent tasks of thwarting, apprehending, and prosecuting international terrorists or murderers... As a matter of States' rights, regulating marijuana and alcohol seem indistinguishable; and, alcohol policy has been entrusted to the States since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933

Let's end the unworkable marijuana prohibition and put our money where our mouth is. Let's solve the problems like border crime. We can do it with pot legalization.

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

The prohibition of drugs causes crime. You don't have to legalize, just decriminalize it.

It would be a good time to replace the drug war with something more constructive. The cure offered the drug war today has probably been more harmful and done more damage than the disease.

It might be a little rough on some people for a while, but I think it's the only way to deal with drugs. Look at Prohibition: all it did was make a lot of criminals rich. Should be legalized for a matter of sanity.

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.

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

You wanna get rid of drug crime in this country? Fine, let's just get rid of all the drug laws.

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.

Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use.

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.