Harry Browne Quotes

I would equate the legalization of drugs to the moral equivalent of genocide.

There is absolutely no difference between alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition except the drug being prohibited.

The drug problem in this country is a consumption issue.

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 a war against the communities.

Asking South American peasants to stop growing coca is like asking the Scots to stop growing barley because people on the other side of the world could not hold their drink.

We know the war on drugs will not be won in Washington DC When the United States of America decides it wants to do something and the people pull together, amazing things can be done.

For all our policing, we understand that law enforcement is not the solution to the problem of drugs in our society.

Drugs are destroying more people than poverty ever did.

The current dominant opinion supporting the war on drugs in general, and our anti-marijuana laws in particular, is reminiscent of the opinion that supported the nationwide ban on alcohol consumption when I was a student. While alcoholic beverages are now regarded as ordinary articles of commerce, their use was then condemned with the same moral fervor that now supports the war on drugs.

In the United States, at least one druggist out of every ten exists by means of profits from the sale of habit-forming drugs, of which, of course, opium and its derivatives are most important.

Uncle Sam is the Worst Drug Fiend in the World Of all the nations of the world the United States consumes most habit-forming drugs per capita. Opium, the most pernicious drug known to humanity, is surrounded, in this country, with far fewer safeguards than any other nation.

What governments decide is illegal is not always based on science. Drugs that are legal cause at least as much damage, if not more, than drugs that are illicit.

The effect of the [opium prohibition] edict was electrical. Farmers stopped cultivation with little resistance. Smokers abandoned the habit by millions; it became unfashionable to smoke in public; and the young were constrained not to acquire the habit…

Heroin: Try it once … Hooked for life.

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.

The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.

I was trying in 'The Power of the Dog' to write a brutally accurate in-your-face, if you will, description of 30 years in the war on drugs. And the effect that that had on people.

Not since the collapse of the attempt to prohibit the ingestion of alcohol has our liberty been in such danger as it now is from the misnamed “war on drugs.”

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

We're becoming drug courts.

We cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.

If its not worth spending everything it takes, it's not a war [on drugs].

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.

The real drug "kingpin" is the user. It is the casual users who create the profits. But we can't put them all in prison; there isn't any room in the jails.