Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

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

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

You got a million drug laws now because the bosses figured there was more money in putting people in jail than taxing something anyone can grow on a window sill.

The way this country deals with drugs is just not funny. What a waste of everyone's time and effort. What a waste of a lot of people's lives.

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

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.

The consumption of drugs could be legalized, not penalized.

There's the old saying that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. There are few better places to apply that adage than the drug war. It's time to end it. It's time to restore peace and harmony to Latin America and the United States. It's time to end the failed war on drugs. It's time to legalize drugs.

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?

There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.

It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom.

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

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

If there is a good case to be made for the illegalization of drugs, there is a better case to be made for the illegalization for tobacco and alcohol.

This has been a clear mandate to Congress to end, as soon as possible, the tragic folly of federal prohibition.

Public opinion in the United States is in favor of legalizing drugs. The one who is blind is the government.

Drug money, such as booze money during Prohibition, has corrupted countless police, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, border patrol agents, prosecutors and judges... Because illegal drugs are unregulated, their purity is unknowable -- accounting for thousands of overdose deaths and injuries... Let's stipulate that some unknown number of Americans will become addicts after legalization, who otherwise would not have. We must ask whether the terrible price we are now paying -- in police costs, international drug control efforts, border security, foregone tax revenue, overdose deaths, corruption and violence -- is worth it.

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

I can officially state that my government and myself believe that all over Europe we need to open a debate on the 'drug question' in order to create more coherent and human policies with better perspectives. . . . The policy of criminalizing consumers has failed, creating many problems to our society.

There's a school of thought that says if you legalize drugs it will solve the problem. We're all good liberals, we said let's do it and see what happens. We wanted to be honest about it. So in our brainstorming sessions we'd say, what if? The finding was that all the negative things came out also. The answer is that we didn't believe in the full legalization of drugs. But we don't believe in the criminalization of drugs, either.

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

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?

What drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has

U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.

I definitely believe in legalizing drugs. It does take the mystery away. It takes the money away, so suddenly there are no drug wars. If you're a junkie, you can get help easier.