Noam Chomsky Quotes

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.

The war on drugs is a war against the communities.

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.

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

We have lost the War on Drugs. We cannot arrest our way out of it….It’s a public health problem, not a crime problem.

The war on drugs is very, very real, and the war on helping people with mental illness is very, very real.

What right does the US have to do anything in Colombia? Does Colombia have the right to bomb North Carolina? There are more Colombians dying from tobacco than Americans dying from heroin.

The importation and sale of marijuana is condemned and punished as a serious crime, but we accept as legitimate the manufacture and sale of an infinitely more addictive and deadly drug: the nicotine in cigarettes that cost the lives of 390,000 American citizens last year.

Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?

Suppose that, say, China established military bases in Colombia to carry out chemical warfare in Kentucky and North Carolina to destroy this lethal crop [tobacco] that is killing huge numbers of Chinese.

Usually we trust that nature has a master plan. But what was it she expected us to do with tobacco?.

It is obviously sensible the crossing of a border ought not to protect a criminal from the consequences of his crime.

I'm against cigarettes, always.

If I saw and if I really sincerely thought that what Putin is doing is harmful for my country and for my people and it needs to be stopped, I wouldn't hesitate to do that.

Policies I advanced as FDA commissioner aimed to get smokers off cigarettes and onto less-harmful forms of nicotine delivery.

The war on drugs has made government more powerful, citizens less free, and hasn't helped users or addicts.

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.

The Drug War is an addiction, really.

The federal government, state governments will not do without that tax revenue from tobacco no matter what. I've always thought it was one of the most contradictory setups that we have, because everything said publicly about the product is intended to besmirch it, impugn it, and do the same thing to the people that use it. And yet here's the government scoring, I mean, you want to talk about obscene profits, the government doesn't do a damn thing but stick its hand in. The government taxes tobacco at every stage. It taxes tobacco when the farmer's thinking about planting it.

I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it's tobacco, then let it be tobacco.

Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.

What drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has

If military action in Iraq is launched without a new U.N. resolution, Canada will not participate.

The government could take away all the drugs in the world and people would spin around on their lawns until they fell down and saw God.