Noam Chomsky Quotes

The war on meth must be fought with a multi-pronged approach.

There isn't any way to keep drugs out of this country.

Defenders of the system will counter by saying this drug war has been aimed at violent crime. But that is not the case. The overwhelming majority of people arrested in the drug war have been arrested for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses.

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

Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly better than no drugs at all.

Right here, in this same headquarters, 52 years ago, the Convention that gave the birth certificate to the war on drugs was approved.

America's drug war is so stupid that if you pay close attention to just how stupid it is -- it'll drive you to use drugs.

We cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.

Drug prohibition enriches criminals and creates an artificially inflated price that lures young people into the drug trade.... We have created a drug exception to the Constitution.

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

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.

The war on drugs is a joke. We spend $40 billion a year, and the proof that it's a failure is that any kid can get almost any drug they want in any city in America within half an hour.

I loved when Bush came out and said, 'We are losing the war against drugs.' You know what that implies? There's a war being fought, and the people on drugs are winning it.

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

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.

Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction.

We should demand that (Customs and Border Protection) focus on the true priority that we face on the war on terror... Stripping small amounts of prescription drugs from the hands of seniors... that should not be a priority.

I have a regret that the entire discussion [with El Chapo]... ignores its purpose, which was to try to contribute to this discussion about the policy in the War on Drugs.

I can't believe a war against drugs when they have anti-drug commercials on TV all day long followed by This Bud is for you.

If ur going to have a war on drugs, have them against ALL drugs, including alcohol, the number one offender.

The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.

Look at all the drug busts all over the country. There must be an audience there somewhere. My feeling is that if we're losing the war on drugs, let's do a movie for the enemy.

In the war on drugs, state and state law enforcement agencies have been rewarded in cash by the federal government - through programs like the Edward Byrne Memorial Grant program - for the sheer numbers of people arrested for drug offenses.

I'd never written nonfiction about the war on drugs, but I know a tremendous amount about it: I taught a class on it for seven years. I was putting into words the stuff I was teaching, and I was writing it up and thought, "Dude, you're writing a book."