Otto Perez Molina Quotes

We cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem.

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

The consumption of drugs could be legalized, not penalized.

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

We're becoming drug courts.

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.

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

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.

Legalize it. Regulate it. Tax it... The arguments against marijuana today are the same as the arguments against liquor years ago.

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.

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

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.

If the principle is, "Let's not get lethal substances out to the public", the first one you'd go after is tobacco. The next one you'd go after is alcohol. Way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana.

By bringing about a rational drug policy, we'd be freeing up a lot of resources for real crime. Drug disputes would get played out with courts rather than with guns. So it would make this country a much better place overnight.

You look at any culture, and prohibition has invariably been an unmitigated failure. It is just idiotic to criminalise any substance, I think.

I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal

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

Addiction, once developed, is a very chronic condition. It is admitted by the authorities, including the narcotics commissioner, that very few "cures" result from incarceration .... The idea of incarcerating even a hundred thousand, let alone a million, unfortunates for a term of five years is rather startling—especially considering that they are sick people, for the most part of average respectability and moral status, not markedly handicapped by their infirmity.

It is designed to place the entire interstate traffic in the habit forming drugs under the administration of the Treasury Department. It is the opinion of the American Opium Commission that it would bring this whole traffic and the use of these drugs into the light of day and thereby create a public opinion against the use of them that would be more important, perhaps, than the Act itself.

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

Drug money, such as booze money during Prohibition, has corrupted countless police, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, border patrol agents, prosecutors and judges... Because illegal drugs are unregulated, their purity is unknowable -- accounting for thousands of overdose deaths and injuries... Let's stipulate that some unknown number of Americans will become addicts after legalization, who otherwise would not have. We must ask whether the terrible price we are now paying -- in police costs, international drug control efforts, border security, foregone tax revenue, overdose deaths, corruption and violence -- is worth it.

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…

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

What I support is a whole different approach with regard to drug use, and that is spending less money on the prosecution and incarceration side and more money on prevention and education, which I know works.