Quotes About Drug war

The drug war has been a war where the direct casualties have primarily been America's poor; America's minorities; and often, unfortunately, America's vulnerable, in terms of people with disease and addiction and mental health.

and see what new horrors he'd have to deal with. The past four months he'd been on loan to the DEA, and they'd made some big drug busts, shut down some of the most evil purveyors of sin and death that ever lived, but they were like the mythical hydra—as soon as you cut off one of its heads, three more grew back to take its place. Sam wanted to stop cutting off heads and

The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

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.

Imagine a progressive president fighting to fix the insane economic inequality in the country or to end the senseless drug war or, best of all, battling to get money out of politics. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

But why, then, do these ideas persist? Why haven't the scientists with the better and more accurate ideas eclipsed these old theories? Hart tells me bluntly: Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?

In the years since heroin was decriminalized in Portugal, its use has been halved there—while in the United States, where the drug war continues, it has doubled.28

If this drug war continues, Henry Smith Williams wrote, there will be a five-billion-dollar drug smuggling industry in the United States in fifty years' time. He was right almost to the exact year.

In the drug war, we guarantee addicts will find it almost impossible to work again, by marking them with the scarlet letter of a criminal record. After the drug war, we will make it easier to employ recovering addicts, with subsidies—because we understand this will keep them from relapsing more effectively than the threat of being caged.

I had to read through these files several times before I realized the significance of this accusation. At the start of the drug war, the man who launched the drug crackdown in California did it because he was paid to—by the drug dealers themselves. They wanted the drug war. They wanted it so badly, they would pay to speed it up.

right at the start of the drug war, gangsters supported prohibition, even bribing Harry Anslinger's agents to impose it more rapidly. Now, at the end of the drug war, they were violently intimidating people who wanted to end prohibition. What, I wondered to myself, does this reveal about who really benefits from this war?

Henry Smith Williams died in 1940. Drug Addicts Are Human Beings remained out of print and largely forgotten for the rest of Anslinger's life, and ours. The book contained a prediction. If this drug war continues, Henry Smith Williams wrote, there will be a five-billion-dollar drug smuggling industry in the United States in fifty years' time. He was right almost to the exact year.58

1993, in the death throes of apartheid, South Africa imprisoned 853 black men per hundred thousand in the population. The United States imprisons 4,919 black men per hundred thousand (versus only 943 white men). So because of the drug war and the way it is enforced, a black man was far more likely to be jailed in the Land of the Free than in the most notorious white supremacist society in the world.

Swiss citizens could see now that U.S.-style drug crackdowns had brought chaos to their streets—and after the government provided a legal route to heroin, the chaos vanished. So they argued that the drug war means disorder, while ending the drug war means slowly restoring order.

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who was the pope of the neoliberal right, and a leading critic of the drug war.

Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it. More people should do acid. It should be sold over the counter.

It would be a good time to replace the drug war with something more constructive. The cure offered the drug war today has probably been more harmful and done more damage than the disease.

details in "The Drug War Goes to the Dogs," the first to be shot are the family dogs. When police in Fremont, California, raided the home of medical marijuana patient Robert Filgo, they shot his pet Akita nine times. Filgo himself was never charged. Last October [2005] police in Alabama raided a home on suspicion of marijuana possession, shot and killed both family dogs, then joked about the kill in front of the family. They seized eight grams

I was a federal public defender during the most important years of the drug war. I saw people go to jail for nothing, and go to jail for a long time.

No entanto, quando se prende um fornecedor, cria-se uma situação de escassez que, inevitavelmente, impulsiona os preços para cima, o que atrai ainda mais fornecedores para o mercado. A guerra contra drogas movida pelos Estados Unidos tem sido relativamente ineficaz exatamente por concentrar-se nos vendedores, não nos compradores.

The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative. The taxonomy on behalf of which this war is being fought would be difficult to explain to an extraterrestrial, or even a farmer like Matyas.

See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.

The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.