Famous Quotes & Sayings

William S. Burroughs

I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence.

William S. Burroughs

For instance, they [The Federal Narcotics Bureau ] give out that marijuana is a harmful and habit-forming drug, and it simply isn't. They claim that you can get addicted to opiates with one shot, and you can't. They over-estimate the physical bad effects, and so forth.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

Now it is one thing to say I say it that people shouldn't consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely something else to condone marijuana laws, the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to inform ourselves on the question?

Sanjay Gupta

I am not backing down on medical marijuana; I am doubling down.

Sanjay Gupta

[Marijuana] doesn't have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works... [I]t is irresponsible not to provide the best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve marijuana. We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.

Roseanne Barr

Legalize hemp and allow women to grow it and make food, clothing and housing for pennies from it and legalize marijuana too. Let women integrate their divided consciousness with a natural herb instead of doctors' pills that kill the liver.

Ronald Reagan

Marijuana is probably the most dangerous drug in America today.

Ziggy Marley

I think it's wrong the way they criminalize herb. There are many more uses than just smoking. Beneficial to mankind.

Ronald Reagan

Permanent brain damage is one of the inevitable results of the use of marijuana.

Willie Nelson

More and more people are finding out the benefits of it - hemp and marijuana. The more they delve into it and research it, the more they realize, Hey wait a minute, we should give this another look.

Morgan Freeman

Marijuana prohibition is just the stupidest law possible....Jus t legalize it and tax it like we do liquor.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

Jacob Zuma

We have noted the appeal of Honorable Ambrosini about the decriminalizing of marijuana for medical use.

Larry Hagman

Well, I decided to stop. And I did. I stopped smoking, and I stopped speed at the same time.

Orson Welles

My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see?

Eric Schlosser

Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.

Newt Gingrich

I think Jefferson and George Washington would strongly discourage you from growing marijuana, and their tactics to stop you would be more violent than they would be today.

Noam Chomsky

If the principle is, "Let's not get lethal substances out to the public", the first one you'd go after is tobacco. The next one you'd go after is alcohol. Way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana.

Noam Chomsky

One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story.

Noam Chomsky

Legalizing marijuana would make a lot of sense, I don't think there's a single case of marijuana overdose on record and tens of millions of users. It's much less dangerous than alcohol, for example.

Noam Chomsky

It was declared by Congress that marijuana makes people insane. But . . . lawyers, defense lawyers, got the idea, OK, I can use this for an insanity defense.

Karl Malone

Marijuana is not tested for, and yet that is the big thing guys are getting in trouble with in the league. It's terrible

P. J. O'Rourke

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?

Paul Nurse

My main efforts focussed on trying to identify the rate controlling steps during the cell cycle. Crucial for this analysis were wee mutants that were advanced prematurely through the cell cycle and so divided at a reduced cell size.

King James I

Smoking is hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.

Milton Friedman

The major basis for my opposition to marijuana prohibition has not been how badly it's worked, the fact that it's produced much more harm than good - it has been primarily a moral reason: I don't think the state has any more right to tell me what to put into my mouth than it has to tell me what can come out of my mouth.

Milton Friedman

Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons

Milton Friedman

There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.

Kevin O'Leary

You either make it illegal, in which case you support a huge underground economy or you tax it within the limits people can afford.

Mary-Louise Parker

I don’t think it’s that controversial. I’m really in favor of legalizing marijuana. I thought people would be more offended by [this series] than they are. I’m surprised they weren’t.

Pope Francis

The scourge of drug trafficking, that favors violence and sows the seeds of suffering and death, requires of society as a whole an act of courage.

Peter McWilliams

I am the representative of all the sick people and what they are doing to me is only the worst case right now, but there will be others. I am living on borrowed time anyway. I owe this part of my life to luck and modern medical science. But I can't imagine what the rest of it will be like if they won't let me use medical marijuana.

Peter McWilliams

..Because when medical marijuana is fully accepted for what it is, we will see a phenomenon that makes Viagra's phenomenon seem limp.