International Drug Trade Quotes

Show me one American drug kingpin who has been put in jail in America. There are a number of Hispanic kingpins from South and Central America but I don’t see any Mr. Smith’s.

We're both Welshmen and growing up, when Howard Marks was finally caught, it was all over the news. He did an interview in the Welsh language, which I also speak, and I was sort of just amazed that this man from a small country was for many years supplying much of the world with most of the marijuana it was smoking. It was incredible.

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.

So much for the crusade against drugs . . . all America is actually doing is consolidating its position as the biggest dealer in addictive and lethal substances on the planet, waging war on all rivals, whether they take the form of the Thai domestic tobacco industry or the Colombian cocaine cartels.

By any objective standard, Joaquin Guzman Loera is an evil man who has caused untold suffering for others.

One substitute for the disappearing Evil Empire (The Soviet Union) has been the threat of drug traffickers from Latin America. In early September 1989, a major government-media blitz was launched by the President. That month the AP wires carried more stories about drugs than about Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa combined. If you looked at television, every news program had a big section on how drugs were destroying our society, becoming the greatest threat to our existence, etc.

It's going to be really interesting to see what the heroin market does in the next two years or so. One thing you can be pretty sure of. The Afghan peasants who grow poppies won't get rich. The money will end up in places like Dubai.

While the American proposals for the limitation of [opium] production may have been theoretically sound, the United States ignored the practical obstacles in the way of their achievement. In one sense these proposals were unfair, since they transferred the responsibility for suppressing the international drug traffic from the strong countries to lamentably weak governments such as those of China, Persia and Turkey. Financially, the United States stood to lose nothing and to gain everything by the acceptance of its proposals. The producing countries, as well as the governments of territories where smoking prevails, would on the other hand be obliged to give up revenues amounting to millions of dollars a year. In other words, the United States asked from the remainder of the world sacrifices which entailed no hardships for herself.

When a drug comes in from Canada, I wanna make sure it cures ya, not kill ya... I've got an obligation to make sure our government does everything we can to protect you. And one - my worry is that it looks like it's from Canada, and it might be from a third world.