Paul McCartney Quotes

Prohibition of substances which give pleasure to people does not work. Addiction is a health problem, not a moral one, and there are many proven strategies which can reduce its burden.

Marijuana is not tested for, and yet that is the big thing guys are getting in trouble with in the league. It's terrible.

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.

Acid wasn't getting a whole lot of bad press at the time, and as I saw the whole bad-press thing happen, I became aware that the government had done a whole lie on all the other benign drugs as well. It became clear to me that the government wanted no real drug education.

You look at any culture, and prohibition has invariably been an unmitigated failure. It is just idiotic to criminalise any substance, I think.

I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol. I've never used marijuana and I don't intend to, but it's just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn't succeeded.

I can tell you that the formula works, and works pretty well. You avoid criminals and violence, you refuse their mode of money that nourishes the cartels, and that is a great solution to the violence problem. In relation to the health problem, I have not ever heard of anybody dying from an overdose of marijuana.

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

I do have a plan for the country [the USA]. It needs education. And there should be drug education - only people should be taught how to smoke pot, because even potheads don't know how to smoke pot. I've evolved into not only an activist, but an educator. I want to show people how, when, and why they should smoke pot.

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

They say drugs are not the answer, but really, what is the question?

I don't think [pot] is more dangerous than alcohol.

And weed's not a drug - that's denial

I know you're supposed to tell kids not to do drugs, but, kids, do it! Do weed! Don't do the other stuff, but weed is good

Marijuana is quite possibly the finest of intoxicants. It has been scientifically proven, for decades, to be much less harmful to the body than alcohol when used on a regular basis.

Of course drugs were fun. And that's what's so stupid about anti-drug campaigns; they don't admit that. I can't say I feel particularly scarred or lessened by my experimentation with drugs. They've gotten a very bad name.

If the principle is, "Let's not get lethal substances out to the public", the first one you'd go after is tobacco. The next one you'd go after is alcohol. Way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana.

Now it is one thing to say I say it that people shouldn't consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely something else to condone marijuana laws, the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to inform ourselves on the question?

I did experiment with marijuana when I was a youth.

I do smoke, but I don't go through all this trouble just because I want to make my drug of choice legal. It's about personal freedom. We should have the right in this country to do what we want, if we don't hurt anybody. Seventy-two million people in this country have smoked pot. Eighteen to 20 million in the last year. These people should not be treated as criminals.

I'm for legalizing marijuana. Why pick on those drugs? Valium is legal. You just go to a doctor and get it and overdose on it - what's the difference? Prozac, all that stuff, so why not marijuana? Who cares? It's something that grows out of the ground - why not? Go smoke a head of cabbage. I don't care what you smoke.

If you are 8 hours a day in a job you hate, you're not going to be a very good spouse; it can contribute to chemical dependency, financial mismanagement.

The war on drugs is really the war on people who buy drugs from people who don't lobby the government.

I like marijuana because it keeps me from killing people. And I think there are a lot of people out there who are just like me. The reason it's not legal is because most people get up in the morning and get high, then forget to go out and vote for it.

We are experiencing a real confusion here in the United States, you know. Why is it OK to drink, but it's not OK to take drugs? Blah, blah, blah. What's a crime? What's criminality? What can you do, what can't you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn't really make sense.