Noam Chomsky Quotes

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.

The U.S. should be equally responsible for diminishing the cocaine market within the United States as it is in fighting the drug elsewhere.

I believe that the war on drugs is a tragically misplaced use of resources - an immoral venture that produces far more suffering than it alleviates.

The war on drugs is being lost on a daily basis.

Communists will infiltrate the highest offices of government in the US until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.

The war on drugs has produced about 10,000 additional homicides a year.

The Drug War has arguably been the single most devastating, dysfunctional social policy since slavery.

Until we do something about demand, Latin America will never be able to solve the drug problem on its own.

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

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.

I've never been a big fan of interdiction. Let's imagine for a minute that you could stop all drugs coming into the United States—all heroin, all cocaine. Synthetic drugs would take over within two months.

I inherited the War on Drugs from a former president who inherited it from a president who also inherited it from a former president. I’m not sure who it is that we are fighting but I know we are not winning.

Show me one American drug kingpin who has been put in jail in America. There are a number of Hispanic kingpins from South and Central America but I don’t see any Mr. Smith’s.

After reading and studying and getting in touch with the amount of information that I had while I was researching to play Pablo, it just reinforced the idea that I had that the war on drugs is a big flop.

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.

So much for the crusade against drugs . . . all America is actually doing is consolidating its position as the biggest dealer in addictive and lethal substances on the planet, waging war on all rivals, whether they take the form of the Thai domestic tobacco industry or the Colombian cocaine cartels.

The war on drugs is really no war at all - it's a business!

The scourge of drug trafficking, that favors violence and sows the seeds of suffering and death, requires of society as a whole an act of courage.

… a succession of generals who held the chief antidrug post in Mexico are now in prison for taking part in the very kind of crime they were supposed to prevent.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it

We waste a lot of time and law enforcement going after these guys that are smoking marijuana.

The war on drugs has failed. Its failure has been so categorical and self-evident that the statement itself is bromidic. By any reasonable metric of success—addiction rates, violence, the availability of drugs in our schools— it’s clear that our 40-year jihad against certain plants and chemicals has done far more harm than good.

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.

While the American proposals for the limitation of [opium] production may have been theoretically sound, the United States ignored the practical obstacles in the way of their achievement. In one sense these proposals were unfair, since they transferred the responsibility for suppressing the international drug traffic from the strong countries to lamentably weak governments such as those of China, Persia and Turkey. Financially, the United States stood to lose nothing and to gain everything by the acceptance of its proposals. The producing countries, as well as the governments of territories where smoking prevails, would on the other hand be obliged to give up revenues amounting to millions of dollars a year. In other words, the United States asked from the remainder of the world sacrifices which entailed no hardships for herself.

I hear that opium smoking is strictly banned in England, and so England knows the harm that the drug does. If it does not allow it to poison its own people, it should not allow it to poison the people of other countries.