Kofi Annan Quotes

"I think decriminalization would've been a wiser first step."

Certainly our democracy is not going to fall if you legalize marijuana.

There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.

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.

Like I said in my election manifesto - why don't they legalise the whole thing and let people like me work?

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.

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

It's hard to fight the war when you've got to debate the worthiness of fighting it.

Should someone go to jail for just doing drugs? I believe the time has come for that to end.

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.

Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use.

… 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.

It's not just the over $8 billion that we would be saving in law enforcement; it's also the over $8 billion that we would be making by taxing marijuana... We are filling our jails with nonviolent drug offenders -- predominantly young, predominantly African American... It's a great beyond left and right issue. It has support across the political spectrum and also the support of the majority of the American people.

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

I think our marijuana policy in this country is absolutely nuts

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

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 grew up in the streets of Pueblo [Colorado]. I never knew marijuana was illegal,

I think it is now widely understood that the so-called "War on Drugs" has largely been a failure. Too many people have developed criminal records for smoking marijuana. Too many people have gone to jail for nonviolent crimes. So I think it's important for us to rethink the war on drugs.

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.

Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course;) the US wants to maintain it. An interesting story. There seems to me no easy way out of this.

Too many Americans have lost faith in our approach to the war on drugs.

Even somebody like Bill Clinton, who I happen to admire very much, the second he was out of office, I remember, he was interview in Rolling Stone and he said he thought we should have legalized marijuana. And I thought, gosh, if only you were in some sort of position to affect change in the last eight years where you could have done something about that.

Yes. And release prisoners who are incarcerated for pot.

I think what everybody believes and agrees with, and to be frank myself, is that the current approach [to the drug trade] is not working, but it is not clear what we should do.