Milton Friedman Quotes

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

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.

I would equate the legalization of drugs to the moral equivalent of genocide.

Should someone go to jail for just doing drugs? I believe the time has come for that to end.

Fighting crime is not cheap, because it requires boots on the ground.

If we had probably a repeal of most of the federal laws on drugs and the unfairness on how Blacks are treated with these drugs laws, it would be a tremendous improvement.

We need to prioritize our law enforcement efforts, and if somebody's gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody else any harm, then perhaps there are other things that our cops should be looking at to engage in and try to clean up some of the other problems that we have in society that are appropriate for law enforcement to do.”

Drug consumption, production and trafficking should be subject to global regulations, which means that consumption and production should be legalized but within certain limits and conditions.

We live in the worst country in the world. At least we do for lazy, inefficient, office-bound police, whose response to an extraordinary rise in violent crime is to order more speed cameras.

If we're going to talk about mayors, that under the current mayor [of New York in 2016], crime has continued to drop, including murders.

We have to bring back law and order in this country and I think the police are phenomenal people.

When it comes to crime, the violent crime rate in America has been lowered during my presidency and any time in the last three, four decades.

Effective law enforcement and social justice must be pursued together, as the foundation of our efforts against crime.

Targets don't fight crime.

Violent crime rates fell steadily from 1993 to 2002, and this nearly coincides with the establishment of the community policing program known as the COPS program under the Clinton administration.

By bringing about a rational drug policy, we'd be freeing up a lot of resources for real crime. Drug disputes would get played out with courts rather than with guns. So it would make this country a much better place overnight.

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

As long as I am mayor there will be law and order in Chicago.

We cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.

For all our policing, we understand that law enforcement is not the solution to the problem of drugs in our society.

My 26 years experience as a police officer and official, including command of two police districts, tells me that unfortunately the only short-term response that can counter the on-street violence and offer neighborhoods relief from crime and drugs is aggressive law enforcement.... Cities and states have made police the institution of first response rather than of last resort in addressing this crisis.

If crime went down 100 percent it would still be 50 percent higher than it should be.

“I’m going to stop crime in the streets.” A president is pressured to make that promise even though a President can’t do anything about street crime.

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

Our government has the weirdest bias against cannabis [Marijuana]. There's no reason for everybody to be so afraid of it. It's not the antichrist the DEA makes it out to be. Industrial hemp is a very useful plant. I challenged the attorney general to get rid of the criminal stigma associated with hemp so we can look at it in terms of how it might be useful. And government has no business telling us what we can and can't use for pain relief.