Quotes about Drugs

No food or drug will ever do for you what a fresh supply of oxygen will. 

"I'm allergic to drugs and alcohol.  When I use them i break out in felonies."

I was dying. Of course. This was it. Curtain. Finis. I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk and prayed to Jesus for another crack at life. But then I became confused, unable to recall who Jesus’s father was. Why this should have been important I can’t venture to guess, but it got me on the subject of fathers. I realized, with an incredible sensation of vertigo, I was old enough to be my own father.

From The Week March 28, 2008

America, Land of the Unfree  Derrick Z. Jackson The Boston Globe

What is the “world’s leading prison sate”?  asked Derrick Z. Jackson.  You might think it is repressive China or Putin’s Russia.  But as a recent Pew Center study recently revealed, it’s the U.S., where 2.3 million people – one out of every 100 adult Americans – now languish behind bars.  Per Capita, our rate of imprisonment easily exceeds that of Russia, is six times that of China, and seven times that of Germany and France.  The primary crime behind this swelling population is not robbery or murder but the sale and possession of drugs.  Under draconian laws adopted during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, most of those sentenced to long prison terms are black:  One in 15 black men is in jail, compared to one in 106 white males.  Yet, in an amazing act of hypocrisy, the State Department last week issued an annual human-rights report that condemned Russia, Burma, and China for arbitrarily imprisoning too many of their citizens.  Nations that live in glass prisons shouldn’t throw stones.

I spent most of that first post-5-Meo night sitting up in bed (Nancy slept on and off beside me), helplessly absorbed in extremely gripping, three-dimensional replays of the horror I had experienced, now and then trying to comfort myself with the thought that this wouldn't, couldn't, last for more than a few nights. The waves of rembrance did not come gently. I was throbbing, shaking, struggling to find some semblance of calm in the psychospiritual riptides that were tossing me about like a piece of shore-bereft driftwood. A hellride minus an offramp.

Hour after hour I endured, feeling as though I would never return from the madness that was infiltrating me. Finally, just before dawn, I fell asleep and very soon found myself in a lucid dream.

I had often had such dreams, frequently using them as portals for all kinds of adventure and experimentation. As such, they were normally quite pleasing to be in; I would know that the body I "had" in the dream was not my actual physical body, and so could then freely engage in activities that would mean disaster or even Death in the "waking" state. If I was afraid in a regular dream and then became lucid during it, I coudl usually face the fear, interacting with it's dream-form until some kind of resolution or integration occured.

But not now. Yes, I knew I was dreaming, but I could not work with the fear therein. The dream was saturated with an enormous, otherworldly terror which was coupled with savagely hallucinatory disorientation. In the midst of this I stood, my dreambody but a ghostly sieve for its surroundings. I knew that if I left the dream, I would still be in the very same state.

At last, I let myself go fully into the dream, despite my conviction that I very likely would not return. Now I was completely inside it, utterly lost, immersed in an edgeless domain of look-alike, spike-headed waveforms, each one sentient and subtly scaly, moving protoplasmically in endless procession in all directions. Just like my 5-Meo setting, but without the speed.

Suddenly, I was overcome by a completely unexpected, rapidly expanding compassion. All fear vanished. A few moments later, I somehow cut - or intended - a kind of porthole in the bizarre universe that enclosed me, as cleanly round as the shrinking aperture of my consciousness at the onset of my 5-Meo journey.

Through this opening the countless alien forms spontaneously came streaming, immediately metamorphosing into flowers, birds, trees, humans: Earthly life in all its wonder and heartbreaking fecundity. Then the dream faded, and I lay radiantly awake, deeply moved, feeling as though the hardest part was now over.

It had, however, just begun.

-Robert Augustus Masters, Darkness Shining Wild, pp.22-24

[many references from drug war facts ]

            The consequences of our irrationality on this front are so egregious that they bear closer examination.  Each year, over 1.5 million men and women are arrested in the United States because of our drug laws.  At this moment, somewhere on the order of 400,000 men and women languish in U.S. prisons for nonviolent drug offenses.  One million others are currently on probation.  More people are imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses in the United States than are incarcerated, for any reason, in all of Western Europe (which has a larger population).  The cost of these efforts, at the federal level alone, is nearly $20 billion dollars annually.  The total cost of our drug laws – when one factors in the expense to state and local governments and the tax revenue lost by our failure to regulate the sale of drugs – could easily be in excess of $100 billion dollars each year.  Our war on drugs consumes an estimated 50 percent of the trial time of our courts and the full-time energies of over 400,000 police officers. These are resources that might otherwise be used to fight violent crimes and terrorism.

            In historical terms, there was every reason to expect that such a policy of prohibition would fail.  It is well known, for instance, that the experiment with prohibition of alcohol in the United States did little more than precipitate a terrible comedy of increased drinking, organized crime, and police corruption.  What is not generally remembered is that Prohibition was an explicitly religious exercise, being the joint product of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the pious lobbying of certain Protestant missionary societies.

            The problem with prohibition of any desirable commodity is money.  The United Nations values the drug trade at $400 billion a year.  This exceeds the annual budget for the U.S. Department of Defense.  If this figure is correct, the trade in illegal drugs constitutes 8 percent of all international commerce (while the sale of textiles makes up 7.5 percent and motor vehicles just 5.3 percent). (35 – www.lindesmith.org)  And yet, prohibition itself is what makes the manufacture and sale of drugs so extraordinarily profitable.  Those who earn there living in this way enjoy a 5,000 to 20,000 percent return on their investment, tax-free.  Every relevant indicator of the drug trades – rates of drug use and interdiction, estimates of production, the purity of drugs on the street, etc. – shows that the government can do nothing to stop it as long as such profit exists (indeed, these profits are highly corrupting of law enforcement in any case).  The crimes of the addict, to finance the stratospheric cost of his lifestyle, and the crimes of the dealer, to protect both his territory and his goods, are likewise the result of prohibition. (36 footnote below)  A final irony, which seems good enough to be the work of Satan himself, is that the market we have created by our drug laws has become a steady source of revenue for terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Shining Path, and others.  [supporting link – not from Sam Harris: drug policy and terrorism]

            Even if we acknowledge that stopping drug use is a justifiable social goal, how does the financial cost of our war on drugs appear in light of the other challenges we face?  Consider that it would require only a onetime expenditure of $2 billion to secure our commercial seaports against smuggled nuclear weapons.  At present we have allocated a mere $93 million for this purpose. (footnote link)   How will our prohibition of marijuana use look (this comes at the cost of $4 billion annually) if a new sun ever dawns over the port of Los Angeles?  Or consider that the U.S. government can afford to spend only $2.3 billion each year on reconstruction of Afghanistan.  The Taliban and Al Qaeda are now regrouping.  Warlords rule the countryside beyond the city limits of Kabul.  Which is more important to us, reclaiming this part of the world for the forces of civilization or keeping cancer patients in Berkeley from relieving their nausea with marijuana?  Our present use of government funds suggests an uncanny skewing – we might even say derangement – of our national priorities.  Such a bizarre allocation of resources is sure to keep Afghanistan in ruins for years to come.  It will also leave Afghan farmers with no alternative but to grow opium.  Happily for them, our drug laws still render this a highly profitable enterprise.

            Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the stars will feel that punishing peaceful men and women for their private pleasure is perfectly reasonable.  We are now in the twenty-first century.  Perhaps we should have better reasons for depriving our neighbors of their liberty at gunpoint.  Given the magnitude of the real problems that confront us – terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the spread of infectious disease, failing infrastructure, lack of adequate funds for education and health care, etc. – our war on sin is so outrageously unwise as to almost defy rational comment.  How have we grown so blind to our deeper interests?  And how have we manages to enact such policies with so little substantive debate?

36 footnote pg 259 of book

When was the last time someone was killed over a tobacco or alcohol deal gone awry?  We can be confident that the same normalcy would be achieved if drugs were regulated by the government.  At the inception of the modern “war on drugs,” the economist Milton Friedman observed that “legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement.”  He then invited the reader to “conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order” (Friedman, “Prohibition and Drugs,” Newsweek May 1, 1972).  What was true then remains true after three decades of pious misrule; the criminality associated with the drug trade is the inescapable consequence of our drug laws themselves.

We all want expanded consciousness and bliss. It's natural, human desire. And a lot of people look for it in drugs. But the problem, is that the body, the physiology, takes a hard hit on drugs. Drugs injure the nervous system, so they just make it harder to get those experiences on your own.

I have smoked marijuana, but I no longer do. I went to art school in the 1960s so you can imagine what was going on. Yet my friends were the ones who said, "No, no, no, David, don't take those drugs." I was pretty lucky.

It was a day that will remain blazingly clear in my memory, and one which unquestionably confirmed the entire direction of my life. I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may not choose to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyse its availability.

We're gonna get high, high, high, when we're low. The fires burn from better days. She scream why, oh why? I said I don't know!

Sex, drugs, and insanity have always worked for me, but I wouldn't recommend them for everyone.

"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.''

An addict is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong

The process of finding new uses for old things is not always intentional. Accidental discoveries sometimes enable firms to serve unexpected customers. Viagra and Minoxidil are examples of such happy accidents. The discovery that Viaga usage was associated with penile erections in some men was initially given little attention by researchers from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals when this "side effect" was first noted in clinical trails. The drug was originally developed to be a treatment for hypertension, and after that failed, it was tested as a treatment for angina. Once again the drug failed. But this time Pfizer researchers followed up on the side effect from their earlier study. They ran clinical trials of Viagra as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, which led them to discover a new application for this existing drug. Similarly, Minoxidil was originally sold in tablet form as a treatment for high blood pressure. A side effect of this medicine was unwanted hair growth. So researchers from Upjohn started examining if it could be applied to the scalp to increase hair growth in balding men. Significant growth was observed in more than half the subjects who used it, and Minoxidil is now marketed in the United States by Upjohn as Rogaine. Researchers at both Pfizer and Upjohn didn't anticipate these side effects, but both groups were creative because they were observant and persistent enough to find new use for an existing medication. In the right hands, nothing succeeds like failure.

Some blame the drug companies. I don’t. They are corporations. Their managers are ordered by law to make money for the corporation. They push a certain patent policy not because of ideals,but because it is the policy that makes them the most money. And it only makes them the most money because of a certain corruption within our political system—a corruption the drug companies are certainly not responsible for. The corruption is our own politicians’ failure of integrity.

These prices are not high because the ingredients of the drugs are expensive. These prices are high because the drugs are protected by patents.The drug companies that produced these life-saving mixes enjoy at least a twenty-year monopoly for their inventions.They use that monopoly power to extract the most they can from the market.That power is in turn used to keep the prices high. 

And as for baby-boomer parents cluck-clucking about illegal substances, ah, gimme a break. Still, I think I'll pass on the rave. But more power to 'em, I say.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Marco Polo tells the tale of The Old Man in the Mountains and how he recruits new members to his Band of Assassins by means of drugs, beautiful women, lush gardens, and religious promises. The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

Gold is worse poison to a man's soul, doing more murders in this loathsome world, than any mortal drug.

Thalidomide is not the first nor the last drug to have brought heartbreak where it was meant to bring help. There have been quite a number of other tragedies since Thalidomide went wrong 13 years ago.

When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent. When they took the second amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun. Now they've come for the first amendment, and I can't say anything at all.

In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug. Chess sometimes plays a similar role. In their unhappiness over the events of this world, some immerse themselves in a kind of self-sufficiency in mathematics. (Some have engaged in it for this reason alone.)

You thought you knew what pain was. You thought that whatever happened, you could handle it. You thought that you were in control. You thought wrong. Now you've lost it all. She's gone. All that's left is the numbing pain. You have to let go to stop the pain, but you can't. It's like a drug to you now. You don't want to need it, but it has become a part of you, and it won't loosen its grip on you. The control you once fought for, is gone. You have no control. And you just don't care

Agency, or the power to choose, was ours as spirit children of our Creator before the world was. It is a gift from God, nearly as precious as life itself. Often, however, agency is misunderstood. While we are free to choose, once we have made those choices, we are tied to the consequence of those choices. We are free to take drugs or not. But once we choose to use a habit-forming drug, we are bound to the consequences of that choice. Addiction surrenders later freedom to choose.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

.The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'

Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines - not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.

We cannot build the new culture for learning to which we aspire in an environment which is depressed and dampened every day by the impact of alcohol and drug abuse, and we should not, and we cannot, hide from that reality any longer. More and more of our students are demanding that they not be imposed upon by others whose judgment and behavior are impaired by substance abuse. It is time to take a stand . . .

Work is the best wonder drug ever devised by God. Work is as necessary to man as eating and sleeping. Pleasure derived from labor is the sweetest of all pleasures.

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.