Drug Legalization Quotes & Sayings

Marijuana legalization's income may help fund education, prevention and treatment programs for harder drugs. What's clear is that the four-decade-old U.S.-backed war on drugs is not working, and that it's producing tens of thousands of dead across the hemisphere, without significant gains in reducing consumption. Experimenting with new weapons to weaken the cartels may be better than doing nothing. — Andres Oppenheimer

The growing policy-reform movement is a broad church. It includes everyone from ganja-smoking Rastafarians to free-market fundamentalists and all in between. There are socialists who think the drug war hurts the poor, capitalists who see a business opportunity, liberals who defend the right to choose, and fiscal conservatives who complain America is spending $40 billion a year on the War on Drugs rather than making a few billion taxing it. The movement can't agree on much other than that the present policy doesn't work. People disagree on whether legalized drugs should be controlled by the state, by corporations, by small businessmen, or by grow-your-own farmers, and on whether they should be advertised, taxed, or just handed out free in white boxes to addicts. — Ioan Grillo

Market conservatives" who disdain cultural issues are little different from liberals in their belief that the marketplace (or in the liberals' case, the marketplace of ideas) will somehow produce virtuous, self-governing citizens. Let's call these folks "liberaltarians."

What the liberaltarians, who clamor for drug legalization, free sex, abortion, legalized prostitution, and limitless pornography above all else do not understand is that the sexual revolution that they mistake for freedom is the most serious threat poed to liberty in America. — Robert H. Knight

I read that as marijuana legalization becomes more popular, it could affect the jobs of drug-sniffing dogs. Or as those dogs put it, 'Thanks, Bo Obama.' — Jimmy Fallon

Once you've produced the scientific data that's necessary to make a drug into a medicine, you've gone a long way towards mainstreaming the acceptance of these drugs as having beneficial properties. And then the step to legalization is not that far behind that. — Rick Doblin

There's a school of thought that says if you legalize drugs it will solve the problem. We're all good liberals, we said let's do it and see what happens. We wanted to be honest about it. So in our brainstorming sessions we'd say, what if? The finding was that all the negative things came out also. The answer is that we didn't believe in the full legalization of drugs. But we don't believe in the criminalization of drugs, either. — George Pelecanos

It is sometimes argued that one of the benefits of legalizing addictive drugs is that they could be taxed, and the government revenues enhanced. From this perspective, this would be the only valid case against legalization. — Walter Block

legalization is associated with a 2.7 percentage point decrease in the probability of having been offered, sold, or given an illegal drug at school. — Anonymous

In England they always try out new mobile phones in Isle of Man. They've got a captive society. So I said, you should try the legalization of all drugs on the Isle of Man and see what happens. — Mick Jagger

Drugs, gambling, and prostitution are the Big Three underground 'moneymakers' in consensual crime. There would be, however, significant boosts to the economy if the stigma attached to the other consensual crimes were eliminated through legalization. — Peter McWilliams

We've got a national campaign by drug legalizers, in my view, to try and use medicinal uses of drugs and legalization of hemp as a stalking horse to get in under the radar screen. — Barry McCaffrey

There is no reason to think today's levels of [drug] addiction are anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization. — George Will