"In themselves narcotic drugs are neither
dangerous nor harmful. Indispensable to modern
medicine, they are used the world over to alleviate
pain and restore health. Thus used they bring a great
benefit to mankind".
UN Secretary General
www.unodc.org/unodc/bulletin/bulletin_1949-01-01_1_page003.html
"The vast majority of drugs - more than 90
per cent - only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the
people,"
Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics
at GlaxoSmithKline
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_medical/story.jsp?story=471139
"In any civilized society, it is every
citizen's responsibility to obey just laws. But at
the same time, it is every citizen's responsibility
to disobey unjust laws."
Martin Luther King Jr
"The purpose of education is to make the
choices clear to people, not to make the choices for
people."
Peter McWilliams
www.hevanet.com/kort/QUOTES20.HTM
"The price of apathy towards public affairs
is to be ruled by evil men."
Plato
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims may be the most
oppressive."
C.S. Lewis, in "The Humanitarian Theory of
Punishment," an essay from "God In The
Dock"
"Totalitarianism is when people believe they
can punish their way to perfection."
House Speaker Newt Gingrich, at a President's Day
Republican fundraiser, May 1998
"Penalties against possession of a drug
should not be more damaging to an individual than the
use of the drug itself."
President Jimmy Carter, Message to Congress, Aug.
2, 1977
"Abusus non tollit usum." [Abuse is no
argument against proper use.] Latin proverb
"There is no way of having a free society in
which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark
of liberty."
Lord Hailsham, former Chief Justice, "The
Dilemma of Democracy"
"The prestige of government has undoubtedly
been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For
nothing is more destructive of respect for the
government and the law of the land than passing laws
which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that
the dangerous increase of crime in this country is
closely connected with this."
Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the
USA," 1921
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of
evil is for good people to do nothing."
Edmund Burke
"He had discovered a great law of human
action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to
make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only
necessary to make the thing difficult to
obtain."
"Tom Sawyer," by Mark Twain, Chapter 2,
"The Glorious Whitewasher"
"This vice brings in 100 million francs each
year. I will certainly forbid it at once - as soon as
you can name a virtue that brings in as much
revenue."
Napoleon Bonaparte
"We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape
the duty to judge right and wrong... There are good
laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it
conforms to the highest traditions of a free society
to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey
them."
Constitutional scholar Alexander Bickel
"I am against Prohibition because it has set
the cause of temperence back twenty years; because it
has substituted an ineffective campaign of force for
an effective campaign of education; because it has
replaced comparatively uninjurious light wines and
beers with the worst kind of hard liquor and bad
liquor; because it has increased drinking not only
among men but has extended drinking to women and even
children."
William Randolph Hearst, initially a supporter of
Prohibition, explaining his change of mind in 1929.
From "Drink: A Social History of America"
by Andrew Barr (1999), p. 239.
"Laws do not persuade just because they
threaten."
Seneca, A.D. 65
"The biggest killer on the planet is stress
and I still think the best medicine is and always has
been cannabis."
Willie Nelson, High Times, January
1991
www.pdxnorml.org/quotes.html