William F. Buckley Jr. Quotes

I am glad that people are trying to have a rational conversation about drugs.

The consumption of drugs could be legalized, not penalized.

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

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

Certainly our democracy is not going to fall if you legalize marijuana.

Yes, cannabis is dangerous, but no more than other perfectly legal drugs. It's time for a rethink

Marijuana is not a dangerous drug. What is dangerous is the War on Drugs…. 750,000 people a year are arrested for marijuana.

… in light of the president's newfound boldness in speaking out about the unfairness of marijuana prohibition enforcement, he should take the opportunity to significantly reform federal marijuana policy and rearrange the agencies that have mismanaged it for so long.

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 cant remember what my line on drugs is. Whats my line on drugs?

I'm actually not in favour of decriminalizing cannabis - I'm in favour of legalizing it. Tax and regulate. It's one of the only ways to keep it out of the hands of our kids because the current war on drugs, the current model isn't working.

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.

America didn't have a drug problem before it passed drug laws. While drugs were consumed by large numbers of people — the number of women habituated to the opium found in laudanum was, no pun intended, staggering — they were, for the most part, easily able to live their lives, do their jobs, and raise their families pretty much the way we do today.

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

Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use.

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.”

I think our marijuana policy in this country is absolutely nuts

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

Anyone who advocates pill testing is giving the green light to drugs. That is absolutely unacceptable.

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.

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.

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

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.

Just plain logic says that the war on drugs does not work. It absolutely does not work. We have this highly addictive legal drug called tobacco which has never resulted in people being sent to prison, but there has been a massive reduction in its consumption simply because responsible adults looking at their own bodies have said they don't want to do that to themselves.

You have to understand that we've had more than 40 years now of massively financed propaganda called the 'War on Drugs'.