1.
It seems people are more willing to let other people control their minds now and recreational drug use doesn't seem to have that same renegade sense of adventure that it once did.
Marc Maron
2.
I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.
M. C. Escher
3.
I find drug use disrespectful, self destructive and weak. I want no part of it. I believe in complete respect for myself and others.
Davey Havok
4.
Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself
Jimmy Carter
5.
People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.
Wendell Berry
6.
There is a safe, nontoxic drug called naloxone that can instantly reverse opioid overdose and prevent most of these deaths. But the drug war interferes with saving overdose victims in two ways: first, because witnesses to overdose fear prosecution, they often don't call for help until it's too late. Second, because the drug war supports the belief that making naloxone available over-the-counter or with opioid prescriptions would encourage drug use, the antidote is available only through harm reduction programs like needle exchanges or in some state programs aimed at drug users.
Maia Szalavitz
7.
If you've heard Hillary Clinton's recent remarks on Ritalin and other drug use on children, you'll find the usual nauseating demagoguery. She appears to be urging Ritalin caution; but, if you listen carefully, she's calling it a miracle drug: "A Godsend for emotional and behavioral problems, for both children and their parents." She insists her efforts are not an attack on the medical treatment of children's emotional well-being because the drugs are very, very "useful."
Peter Breggin
8.
This stigma associated with drug use--the belief that bad kids use, good kids don't, and those with full-blown addiction are weak, dissolute, and pathetic--has contributed to the escalation of use and has hampered treatment more than any single other factor.
David Sheff
9.
Personally I have never found the practice of recreational drug use appealing. In fact, I have always found the lifestyle and the people who surround it to be abhorrent.
Davey Havok
10.
I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.
Carrie Fisher
11.
I think it's overly simplistic to say that any one single strategy is going to really change the focus and change the trajectory of drug use.
Michael Botticelli
12.
There are no violent gangs fighting over aspirin territories. There are no violent gangs fighting over whisky territories or computer territories or anything else that's legal. There are only criminal gangs fighting over territories covering drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other victimless crimes. Making a non-violent activity a crime creates a black market, which attracts criminals and gangs, which turns what was once a relatively harmless activity affecting a small group of people into a widespread epidemic of drug use and gang warfare.
Harry Browne
13.
Let me say that the path I did take for a brief period of my life was not of reckless drug use, hurting others, but it was a path of quiet rebellion, of a little experimentation of a darker side of my confusion in a confusing world, lost in the midst of finding my identity.
Jennifer Capriati
14.
During the 60's, drug use was in fashion in the U.S.
Bill Toomey
15.
Illegal drug use runs contrary to the image of health depicted by cycling. Distributors of these drugs must be prosecuted more harshly as they are ciminals.
Bernard Hinault
16.
Looking at the data and at my drug use and evaluating it carefully just let me see that I wasn't special, but my drug use challenged what I thought about cocaine. Because I would accept when I would say, "What happened to that person?" and someone would say, "They started using cocaine...they went downhill..." I would just accept that, even though I had a different experience and all these other people had a different experience. But I would throw that out because I thought my experience was an aberration.
Carl Hart
17.
Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'.
Bram Cohen
18.
I'll tell you what I'd do if it were up to me: I would establish a strictly controlled distribution network through which I would make most drugs, excluding the most dangerous ones like crack, legally available. Initially I would keep the prices low enough to destroy the drug trade. Once that objective was attained I would keep raising the prices, very much like the excise duty on cigarettes, but I would make an exception for registered addicts in order to discourage crime. I would use a portion of the income for prevention and treatment. And I would foster social opprobrium of drug use.
George Soros
19.
One of the drivers of heroin has been the misuse of pain medication. If we're gonna deal with heroin and heroin use in the United States, we really have to focus on reducing the magnitude of the prescription drug use issue.
Michael Botticelli
20.
I wondered if I would talk about drug use. But I guess, why hide it?
Elliott Smith
21.
Too many whites are getting away with drug use... Too many whites are getting away with drug sales... The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too.
Rush Limbaugh
22.
And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture.
Kurt Loder
23.
My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm-as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.
Camille Paglia
24.
When Stevie and I joined the band, we were in the midst of breaking up, as were John and Christine. By the time Rumours was being recorded, things got worse in terms of psychology and drug use. It was a large exercise in denial - in order for me to get work done.
Lindsey Buckingham
25.
It touches on drug use. I got caught up in that for almost two years.
Elliott Smith
26.
Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so 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.
Rush Limbaugh
27.
And I was ashamed of myself for feeling like I had to do that in order to look a certain way. I felt misshapen, just not natural anymore. And I think it was a big stimulator of my drug use.
Jamie Lee Curtis
28.
Drug use makes you snappy, and you get very bad-tempered and have terrible hangovers.
Mick Jagger
29.
We have not yet concluded that needle-exchange programs do not encourage drug use.
Donna Shalala
31.
The problem with drugs is that most of the people that use the drugs, use it as a license to be an asshole.
Frank Zappa
32.
Roughly speaking, this hypothesis asks whether drug use causes some of the diseases officially associated with AIDS, such as immunodeficiency and Kaposi's sarcoma.
Serge Lang
33.
I don't like jokes about sex or bodily functions or drug use or the difference between New York and L.A. I never do any of that.
David Letterman
34.
There is a lot of sixties-bashing going on these days that I don't agree with at all. I feel that extremely important ideals were brought to the forefront of the collective consciousness at that time. Granted, drug use was so pervasive that our generation did not as a group have the capacity to manifest our ideals to any great extent. But many of the people who were young in the sixties and who were most touched by that collective ethos are still touched.
Marianne Williamson
35.
The problem is not with the athletes, but with us. No matter how blatant the drug use may be, we don't stop watching the Tour de France. Maybe we should just turn off the television and get on our own bikes.
Peter Singer
37.
The legalization of drugs, a proliferation of a public health approach to drug use and drug addition, a compassionate mental health system. And can we just say gender equality and the end of mass incarceration and the final shedding of the vestiges of a slave-based nation? Can we have that, too? Can I have it all?
Ayelet Waldman
38.
When I started acting in the film industry when I was 16 years old, in 1980, I was going to all the revival theaters in Los Angeles. They were playing mostly films from the '60s and '70s, some from the early '20s and '30s, before that Hays commission. Those films did question things a lot, and there definitely was a switch in 1934. You can see very distinctly in 1934, it's harder to understand what the real culture was. Films made before 1934, you can really kind of see the racism, sexism, drug use, etc. that was going on at that time. And then it was all stopped.
Crispin Glover
39.
A certain group of adolescents evidence clear "druggie" behavior and attributes some time before they actually begin drug use.
Virgil Miller Newton
40.
When leaders carry out policies for decades that have no consequences for the stated goal and are very costly, you have to ask whether they are telling you the truth or whether the policies are for a different goal, because they are not reducing drug use.
Noam Chomsky
41.
I've never really been interested in recreational drug use.
Ayelet Waldman
43.
Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.
Will Self
44.
If you're worried about a kid and drug use, the safest, best thing to do is individual counseling or family therapy, none of which will expose kids to more deviant or problematic peers and both of which are proven to be effective and at the very least, they won't hurt.
Maia Szalavitz
45.
No one made a decision to militarize the police in America. The change has come slowly, the result of a generation of politicians and public officials fanning and exploiting public fears by declaring war on abstractions like crime, drug use, and terrorism. The resulting policies have made those war metaphors increasingly real.
Radley Balko
46.
I really think we were charting a course to having a more sane response to mass incarceration, to drug use, and to understanding that the war on drugs has resulted only in the empowerment of vast criminal enterprises and the destruction of democracies around the world. And all that is coming to a miserable, horrific halt.
Ayelet Waldman
47.
The similarities between street drug abuse and psychotropic prescription drug use are disturbing. Both types are toxic. Both can cause psychosis, damage the brain and other organs, and even cause death. And neither type of mind-altering drugs, legal or illegal, treats disease. It's important to recognize that the only significant difference between many prescription psychotropic drugs and street drugs such as "speed" and "downers" is that prescription drugs are legal.
Sydney Walker
48.
I was seeing indoor workers as opposed to streetwalkers and from what I hear, drug use is much more prevalent among streetwalkers then it is with girls who are escorting.
Chester Brown
49.
External means of escape like alcohol, drug use, and even overeating are a means of pushing uncertainty away and covering it up temporarily. And they may feel comforting for a moment, but I don't need to tell you that eventually they will cause more trouble than they ever solve.
Tara Stiles
50.
We're already going down that path with illegal drug use and incarceration. I can't imagine it getting any worse.
Greg Gutfeld