John Hickenlooper Quotes

We need to repeal the whole war on drugs. It isn’t working. We have already spent over $400 billion since the early 1970s, and it is wasted money

The war on drugs has failed. Its failure has been so categorical and self-evident that the statement itself is bromidic. By any reasonable metric of success—addiction rates, violence, the availability of drugs in our schools— it’s clear that our 40-year jihad against certain plants and chemicals has done far more harm than good.

So many people view the war on drugs as a failure, as something that was perhaps intended and carried out with good intentions but very badly executed.

The War on Drugs employs millions - politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and now the military - that probably couldn't find a place for their dubious talents in a free market, unless they were to sell pencils from a tin cup on street corners.

I believe that the war on drugs is a tragically misplaced use of resources - an immoral venture that produces far more suffering than it alleviates.

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

The war on drugs is a joke. We spend $40 billion a year, and the proof that it's a failure is that any kid can get almost any drug they want in any city in America within half an hour.

Once brave politicians and others explain the war on drugs' true cost, the American people will scream for a cease-fire. Bring the troops home, people will urge. Treat drugs as a health problem, not as a matter for the criminal justice system.

The war on drugs is being lost on a daily basis.

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.”

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

We've been fighting this war on drugs for 60 or 70 years and haven't gotten anywhere yet.

I inherited the War on Drugs from a former president who inherited it from a president who also inherited it from a former president. I’m not sure who it is that we are fighting but I know we are not winning.

The war on drugs - a big-government product if there ever was one - has been wildly unsuccessful, by any metric.

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 war on drugs is wrong, both tactically and morally. It assumes that people are too stupid, too reckless, and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt.

I think it's too bad that everybody's decided to turn on drugs, I don't think drugs are the problem. Crime is the problem. Cops are the problem. Money's the problem. But drugs are just drugs.

It was when the upper middle class was threatened.... Until then nobody really cared about the war on drugs.

Until we do something about demand, Latin America will never be able to solve the drug problem on its own.

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.

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

[Referring to the Congress:] They're trying to outdrug each other. Each one wants to seem tougher on drugs than the next one.

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.

If drugs are bad, any respectable society should do something to deal with them.