Ozzy Osbourne Quotes

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.

Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you are a millionaire conservative radio jock, which makes it an illness and needs our prayers for your recovery.

The effect of the [opium prohibition] edict was electrical. Farmers stopped cultivation with little resistance. Smokers abandoned the habit by millions; it became unfashionable to smoke in public; and the young were constrained not to acquire the habit…

The present blitz about drugs - I think it looks very much like how we treated insane people 100 years ago -- throw them in the cage - as if that's the whole answer. And it's not the whole answer.

The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, "Jewish problem" was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; "drug-abuse problem" is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.

I went public with the alcoholism, very early on... the early '70s. Mercedes McCambridge, the actress, I think was the first recognizable person that went before Congress and talked about it, and I thought that was a good idea, to take some of the stigma away from it and say "Normal, average people can fall prey to it." So it's been public for me. I did a movie about an alcoholic. And today, you're nobody unless you've been to rehab. It seems like everybody has some kind of an addiction.

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

The fifties were when people started coming down on "juvenile delinquents," "hoodlums," "vandals"--anybody that was young, wore a motorcycle jacket, and didn't act polite around older people.

I've noticed that if you spend ten years without shooting dope, people consider you an ex-junkie, but one never is considered an 'ex-woman-beater.'

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.

It's a joke. Greed and the desire to take drugs are two separate things. If you want to separate the two, the thing you do is make drugs legal. Accept the reality that people do want to change their consciousness, and make an effort to make safer, healthier drugs.

We can see in retrospect that criminalizing the consumption of alcohol proves not to be the solution to the very real problem of drunkenness. So to what I want to say is the very real problem of the human susceptibility to addiction isn't best dealt with by building prisons and throwing people into jails.

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

This stigma associated with drug use--the belief that bad kids use, good kids don't, and those with full-blown addiction are weak, dissolute, and pathetic--has contributed to the escalation of use and has hampered treatment more than any single other factor.

Once and for all, people must understand that addiction is a disease. It’s critical if we’re going to effectively prevent and treat addiction. Accepting that addiction is an illness will transform our approach to public policy, research, insurance, and criminality; it will change how we feel about addicts, and how they feel about themselves. There’s another essential reason why we must understand that addiction is an illness and not just bad behavior: We punish bad behavior. We treat illness.

It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing?

Addiction is not just for bad people or scumbags - it's a universal disease.

I've seen so many horrible and awful results and consequences of people practicing alcoholism. It's murder, I've seen that. I've seen a lot of suicides, a lot of strange sins.

You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet -- you've not got your niche in creation. ~ The Well of Loneliness, 1928

People always try to palm me weed when I'm always talking about how I don't smoke weed. But they always try to ... and when they stop offering me weed, then I'm going to feel kind of out of touch, like: "What did I do wrong that you won't offer me drugs that I don't do?" Because I'll trade those drugs out for drugs that I do do.

All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as psychological as malaria. It's a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them.

That's why cocaine is illegal - it makes pussy too easy to get.

It's okay to get stoned, as long as its not by other people.

If more people were stoned there would be less violence in the world.