Bill Hicks Quotes

I just think it's shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of controlled substance.

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

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.

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

For 40 years we have been looking for ways to make the existence of the narcotic drug addict just as tough as possible. For 40 years we have asked only what new penalties, what new police tech-niques, might make it easier to catch him and lock him up, whether as an ordinary criminal or, more recently, in connection with some more or less sincere efforts at rehabilitation in confinement. I believe that this entire approach is open to grave question as a practical matter

The drug culture has shaped at least one major change since the Sixties; It became the basis for overloading our prisons.

The war on drugs is a war on our own families …. We have to move from a system that punishes to a system that treats.

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.

I've been in the music business for 15 years. I've seen it all, man. I've just always been scared of coke. When I was on the road and saw some people do it, I was afraid I would really like it. I was afraid of the consequences.

We're already going down that path with illegal drug use and incarceration. I can't imagine it getting any worse.

I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled.

We can see in retrospect that criminalizing the consumption of alcohol proves not to be the solution to the very real problem of drunkenness. So to what I want to say is the very real problem of the human susceptibility to addiction isn't best dealt with by building prisons and throwing people into jails.

If you want to get people off drugs, improve reality.

The consumption of drugs could be legalized, not penalized.

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.

[We have to make] a distinction between dangerous violent criminals and people who are engaged in non-violent criminal activities….Your taking somebody out of the economy, breaking up their families, and putting them in a place with hardened criminals. I think that it is pretty hard to argue that has been a positive long-term result.

We waste a lot of time and law enforcement going after these guys that are smoking marijuana.

I don't even think jail helps Gucci Mane. It clearly doesn't.

Treatment of alcohol addiction can take many forms.

I think that addiction is a very, very important thing that has to be treated, but has to be treated as a health problem and not as a police problem.

If people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.

The Force deals a lot with the heroin epidemic, which I'm sorry to know people are experiencing in Canada.

Mexico's a great place to overcome a drug addiction.

If I started drinking again, there would be a lot of people bringing me pot because I can't handle alcohol. I just am not a good drinker. I get a little alcohol in me and I start trying to change the world, and that's not good. A lot of people are the same way. So that's why I don't drink anymore.

As we celebrate Recovery Month, it is time for Congress to knock down the barriers to treatment and recovery for 26 million Americans suffering the ravages of alcohol and drug addiction.