Drug Policy Reform Quotes

There is absolutely no good reason – medical or law enforcement – that marijuana should not be legal.

If you had a magic wand today, and you had one wish - to wipe out all the drug dealers, take them all off the streets and put them in jail, no trial, everybody who sold drugs would automatically be convicted. You know what's going to happen? There's going to be new ones. Why? Because the drug users are going to create them.

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

Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.

The drug war is a holocaust in slow motion.

It's just the stupidest law possible... You're just making criminals out of people who aren't engaged in criminal activity. And we're spending zillions of dollars trying to fight a war we can't win! We could make zillions, just legalize it and tax it like we do liquor. It's stupid.

Like I said in my election manifesto - why don't they legalise the whole thing and let people like me work?

What drugs haven't destroyed, the war against them has

We should decriminalize all drugs. The assumptions on which our drug policies are based are flawed.

I think it is now widely understood that the so-called "War on Drugs" has largely been a failure. Too many people have developed criminal records for smoking marijuana. Too many people have gone to jail for nonviolent crimes. So I think it's important for us to rethink the war on drugs.

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.

Marijuana is not a dangerous drug. What is dangerous is the War on Drugs…. 750,000 people a year are arrested for marijuana.

Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course;) the US wants to maintain it. An interesting story. There seems to me no easy way out of this.

… in light of the president's newfound boldness in speaking out about the unfairness of marijuana prohibition enforcement, he should take the opportunity to significantly reform federal marijuana policy and rearrange the agencies that have mismanaged it for so long.

The big lock-up is about drugs. Here's the real scam. The drug war is one of the games to get more convictions and prisoners.

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

Just as the process of repealing national alcohol prohibition began with individual states repealing their own prohibition laws, so individual states must now take the initiative with respect to repealing marijuana prohibition laws.

I'd like to have every gentleman and lady in this room commit themselves to get our government to legalize drugs. So they have to get it through a doctor, not just some gangsters who sell it under the table. Let's legalize drugs like they did in Amsterdam. No one's hiding or sneaking around corners to get it. They go to a doctor to get it.

Yes. And release prisoners who are incarcerated for pot.

If we had probably a repeal of most of the federal laws on drugs and the unfairness on how Blacks are treated with these drugs laws, it would be a tremendous improvement.

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

It's ridiculous that we continue to incarcerate anyone for using a substance that actually causes far less damage than alcohol. No one goes out looking for fights on marijuana. No one dies from marijuana intoxication. And no one should be jailed for possessing marijuana.

Individual freedom and drug laws contradict each other. In a genuinely free society, people are free to ingest whatever they want to ingest, no matter how harmful or destructive. What people ingest is none of the government's business. If drug users or drug addicts wish to get help, a free society provides the means to do so.

The War on Drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws.

It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom.