Carl Hart Quotes

I think our marijuana policy in this country is absolutely nuts

The consumption of drugs could be legalized, not penalized.

The prohibition of drugs causes crime. You don't have to legalize, just decriminalize it.

Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself

Now it is one thing to say I say it that people shouldn't consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely something else to condone marijuana laws, the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to inform ourselves on the question?

America didn't have a drug problem before it passed drug laws. While drugs were consumed by large numbers of people — the number of women habituated to the opium found in laudanum was, no pun intended, staggering — they were, for the most part, easily able to live their lives, do their jobs, and raise their families pretty much the way we do today.

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.

The war on drugs is a war against the communities.

Although our war on drugs must be fortified with the best laws, enforcement efforts and resources, we would not be successful without your individual commitment to this cause.

You wanna get rid of drug crime in this country? Fine, let's just get rid of all the drug laws.

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

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

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.

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

Yes, cannabis is dangerous, but no more than other perfectly legal drugs. It's time for a rethink

Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder.

We need to prioritize our law enforcement efforts, and if somebody's gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody else any harm, then perhaps there are other things that our cops should be looking at to engage in and try to clean up some of the other problems that we have in society that are appropriate for law enforcement to do.”

I hear that opium smoking is strictly banned in England, and so England knows the harm that the drug does. If it does not allow it to poison its own people, it should not allow it to poison the people of other countries.

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

It's the new slavery. It came out of the drug laws and it really is something we're going to have to confront, but I don't see enough people up in arms about that. We need to be.

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

I am glad that people are trying to have a rational conversation about drugs.

The way this country deals with drugs is just not funny. What a waste of everyone's time and effort. What a waste of a lot of people's lives.

Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.

U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.