Michelle Alexander Quotes

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

The war on drugs is a war against the communities.

I regret I feel this passion, but they [alcoholics & drug addicts] have been relegated to dying in the street forever, and I want to get them out. I need your help to do it. I am angry, it is obvious. I am angry that the Department says they have everything they need, when everything in the country indicates it isn't being done. So, I will continue to be angry. I hope it will be a friendly anger as we try to work out these problems that we have between us.

The consumption of drugs could be legalized, not penalized.

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.

Prohibition of substances which give pleasure to people does not work. Addiction is a health problem, not a moral one, and there are many proven strategies which can reduce its burden.

On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It's devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.

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.

Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.

Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.

I've lost over 800 West Virginians the last year. Lost their lives to opiate and drug addiction. This is something that we've got to fight. We need to have treatment centers that take care of people. We need to start basically education from kindergarten all the way through adulthood. We need to get involved and stop this epidemic that's going on that's just ravaging.

Now they're calling taking drugs an epidemic - that's cos white folks are doing it.

I'm a recovered alcoholic. I don't do anything anymore, but those things, those things take away ... You're a different personality completely when you take those. For those who are really chemically dependent on anything, it's not you.

I want a Goddamn strong statement on marijuana, I mean one that just tears the ass out of them. You know, its a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish.

Drugs kill, just like cancer. So don't smoke... tumors.

The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders tells us who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not. Drunk drivers are predominately white and male.

For my most of my career I've been a falling-down drunk. Most of my interviews were done hungover, and for a while it was great.

All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care.

Every generation finds the drug it needs.

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.

That sounds like Anthony Soprano. He has a point. I've said it before: if you're black and you sell dope, you end up in the big house; if you're white and you sell a large amount of dope, you end up visiting the White House. So it's a matter of race and it's a matter of scale, frankly.

The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics.

The War on Drugs is a war on people, but particularly it's been a war on low-income people and a war on minorities. We know in the United States of America there is no difference in drug use between black, white and Latinos. But if you're Latino in the United States of America, you're about twice as likely to be arrested for drug use than if you're white. If you're black, you are about four times as likely to be arrested if you're African American than if you are white. This drug war has done so much to destroy, undermine, sabotage families, communities, neighborhoods, cities.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

We have tax revenue that's going to allow us to look in a much more comprehensive way at intervening in addiction.