Nadine Strossen Quotes

… 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.

During my time at DEA, I saw how marijuana prohibition has done absolutely nothing to make Americans safer or healthier. It has only served to destroy millions of innocent lives, erode civil liberties, perpetuate a growing prison-industrial complex, and enrich and strengthen the most violent criminal organizations.

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'm a recreational pot-smoker. There has never been enough of a distinction between marijuana and other drugs. It's a human rights issue, a censorship issue, and a choice issue.

To make marijuana against the law is like saying God made a big mistake.

Why is marijuana against the law? It grows naturally on our planet, serves a thousand different functions, all of them positive. To make marijuana against the law is like saying that God made a mistake.

I don't believe that laws against things that people do regularly, like safe and responsible use of marijuana, make any sense.

If alcohol is legal, I don't see why people still have a ban on marijuana.

I think that marijuana should be legalized. I think the only reason it isn't legal is because politicians who smoked it when they were young men or young women just don't have the courage when they become politicians to legalize it.

Just as the process of repealing national alcohol prohibition began with individual states repealing their own prohibition laws, so individual states must now take the initiative with respect to repealing marijuana prohibition laws.

Well, as I understand it, the main supporters are beer companies and the pharmaceutical companies. I'd like them to show me the dead bodies from marijuana. But they can't because there aren't any.

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

The problem of marijuana has assumed the dimensions of a national emergency.

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.

I don't have a problem with states experimenting with [legalizing marijuana]. I think that's the role of states

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

Let's end the unworkable marijuana prohibition and put our money where our mouth is. Let's solve the problems like border crime. We can do it with pot legalization.

Legalizing marijuana would make a lot of sense, I don't think there's a single case of marijuana overdose on record and tens of millions of users. It's much less dangerous than alcohol, for example.

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.

If someone wants to do drugs ... as long as he or she isn't corrupting minors or driving under the influence or endangering others, shouldn't a person have that right?

Adults in a free country should be able to smoke a joint if they want to.

Having a debate right now over whether or not to legalize marijuana is kind of like having a debate over whether the sun will come up tomorrow.

Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did... In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or early childhood education.

Marijuana should be licensed and kept out of the hands of teenagers. It's too good for them.

Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.