Jerry Meninick Quotes

Crack has destroyed more families than poverty.

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

I am a raging alcoholic and a raging addict and I didn't want to see my kids do the same thing.

The white traders keep these poor Indians continually under the force of liquor. They entirely estrange the affections of the Indians from the English.

Our poor children are suffering every day for want of necessities of life…All this is for the love of strong drink.

Thou deputy of Pleimont and Boston, paint our words on paper and send them to those on whom thou art dependant; and say to them that all the allied Savages dwelling on the river Kenebek hate firewater…; and that if the English have any more of it brought hither to sell to the Savages, the latter will believe the English wish to exterminate them.

But who is it that has made my people drunk? Indians cannot make whiskey. Indians do not sell it. But white people make it and bring it among us. It is they that have brought the evil upon us and we cannot remove it. The white people can remove it and now we call upon them to do it. We ask them to take their whiskey and run away, and leave us sober as they found us.

This day we have held a council, and it is agreed by the Shawnee in general that whatever rum is in our towns shall be broke and split and not drunk; and whosoever shall bring any rum or any sort of strong drink into our towns, Indian or white man, let it be little or much, it shall be broke or split in the presence of the whole town…

The speech of a Creek—Indian, against the immoderate use of spirituous liquors. Delivered in a national assembly of the Creeks, upon the breaking out of the late war.

Liquor traffic is un-American, pro-German, crime-procuring, food-wasting, youth-corrupting, home-wrecking, [and] treasonable.

The addict is under compulsion not capable of management without outside help.... If addicts can be punished for their addiction, then the insane can also be punished for their insanity. Each has a disease and each must be treated as a sick person.

While we may have taken away some of the criminal element when we repealed prohibition, we certainly didn't solve the problem of alcoholism.

[Referring to alcohol:] After the lapse of nearly fifty years of undisputed political freedom, the blood-freezing clank of a cruel bondage is still heard.

Black people are killing themselves with alcohol ... it is a scourge of our neighborhoods. It's a disease that feeds on our people.

Whether or not the world would be vastly benefitted by a total and final banishment from it of all intoxicating drinks seems to me not now open to question. Three-fourths of mankind confess the affirmative with their tongues, and I believe all the rest acknowledge it in their hearts. Ought any, then, to refuse their aid in doing what good the good of the whole wold demands.

Ye Dutch, Swede, and English have by Brandy and Specially Rum, almost Debaucht ye Indians all.

Indians should not drink whiskey. It was not made for them, but for the white people who alone know how to use it. That is the cause of all the mischiefs which the Indians suffer.

The illicit traffic of liquor among the Indians and the indiscriminate leasing of their lands have done more harm than anything that happened to them in their history, even now we hear of some desperate deed committed through their drunkenness.

There are 8,000 addicts in New York City. With legitimate supplies of drugs cut off, this small army would be likely to break out violently when the narcotic hunger becomes stronger. If the victims are permitted to roam about without the drugs they become dangerous.

Little by little it dawned upon me that this law was not making people drink any less, but it was making hypocrites and law breakers of a great number of people. It seemed to me best to go back to the old situation in which, if a man or woman drank to excess, they were injuring themselves and their immediate family and friends and the act was a violation against their own sense of morality and no violation against the law of the land.

Evidence...proves that prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it.

While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal, substances

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.

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.

Prohibition of substances which give pleasure to people does not work. Addiction is a health problem, not a moral one, and there are many proven strategies which can reduce its burden.