William O. Douglas Quotes

The addict is under compulsion not capable of management without outside help.... If addicts can be punished for their addiction, then the insane can also be punished for their insanity. Each has a disease and each must be treated as a sick person.

Addiction is a neurological disease—a disease of the brain…. No one wakes up in the morning and says today ‘I want to become an addict.’

I didn't check into rehab. Instead of me heading into a place - I was just drinking too much and I needed to get my life together. I'm still in therapy and stuff like that, but it's good. I'm great. I feel fine.

The society focuses on the addict, and its impact on our quality of life, but we don't focus on people who are rehabilitated and in recovery.

The alcoholic suffers from a disease.

Addiction, once developed, is a very chronic condition. It is admitted by the authorities, including the narcotics commissioner, that very few "cures" result from incarceration .... The idea of incarcerating even a hundred thousand, let alone a million, unfortunates for a term of five years is rather startling—especially considering that they are sick people, for the most part of average respectability and moral status, not markedly handicapped by their infirmity.

I have an addiction. I have a mental illness.

I've been in a treatment center for drinkin'. I stayed for two days, then escaped.

I have spent most of my life working with mental illness. I have been president of the world's largest association of mental-illness workers, and I am all for more funding for mental-health care and research - but not in the vain hope that it will curb violence.

I can choose to accelerate my disease to an alcoholic death or incurable insanity, or I can choose to live within my thoroughly human condition.

Drug abuse is a medical disease that requires medical professionals.

Mental illness is a disease and organic mental illness of young kids is becoming more and more of a disease... we do need to talk about it.

I want to remove the taboo from mental illness.

Our job is to incarcerate offenders and not hospitalize sick people…. We are reluctant to advocate better mental help facilities within our jail as it would only attract more people in need of mental health services

Crack has destroyed more families than poverty.

We fully understand that even in our own lands we’re now a minority, but that doesn’t in any way mean we should rescind our efforts to deal with the pain of alcohol abuse in those lands.

Black people are killing themselves with alcohol ... it is a scourge of our neighborhoods. It's a disease that feeds on our people.

A river of grog is killing people and destroying our communities. Spiritually, socially, psychologically, there is a total breakdown in families where people are drunk most of the time -- the children are not safe.

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.

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

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.

Treating mental health illness is compassionate and saves money.

The federal government has lost its way and largely ignored the needs of people with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar illness.

As I kept having episodes of depression, I realized that it was not a one-off: that I had, well, not a disease, really - more an illness.

Many politicians, celebrities, businessmen and women, and community leaders now are open about their struggles with mental illnesses, something almost unheard of when I began. Together, we are spreading the word that mental health affects all of us and deserves our support and attention.