"The drug war is completely counterproductive; it's not helping in any way."
"I'm in favor of the decriminalization of all drugs because I think that it leads to better outcomes."
"We are ready for a different and better conversation about the innocent people who were swept up into the drug task force arrests because they cut a deal with some unaccountable informant."
"The drug war is so bad that you can come from pretty much any perspective and see what a disaster it is."
"We need to stop locking people up for drugs... treat that like a medical issue."
"Drugs should be treated like a medical issue."
"I want to free every single nonviolent drug offender in this country. I also want to legalize marijuana. I want to decriminalize all substances."
"The easiest way to deal with both of those would be to end the drug war so we can grow and sell drugs domestically in an open market rather than getting it from drug cartels in the south."
"We really should just declassify opioids as a schedule one drug, and turn over that rock so that we could actually treat people with addictions."
"I don't think drugs should be legal. I don't like drugs. I hope they recognize that it's not about whether you like drugs or not. It's about whether you like freedom or not."
"It's time to shift to a public health model for dealing with drug addiction and drug abuse."
"Decriminalization of drugs, for example, is profoundly successful in the nation of Portugal. But what do they do? They didn't just decriminalize drug usage; they also, on top of that, created systems that eliminated needle sharing and offered up rehabilitation opportunities for people who were regular substance abusers."
"Treating drug addiction like a medical problem, not a crime problem, does the best job of making the world a better place."
"The War on Drugs doesn't work and causes a lot of harm."
"90% of the drug problem is prohibition related, not use related."
"The decriminalization [of drugs in Portugal] seems to have worked out phenomenally for their country."
"I think we need to talk about, for example, ending the war on drugs... very important that should be absolutely crucial."
"Legalization is not going to help, but maybe doing medically assisted treatment more and making that more accessible, that's a good solution."
"No one goes to prison for a drug offense. They go into rehabilitation."
"I understand wanting to give people safe access to doing drugs to reduce the problems we see in the periphery of drug use."
"I just don't think we should be putting people in prison for it; we should be trying to help them."
"The responsibility associated with the liberalization of drug laws will actually help mature the world in a very beneficial way."
"The geopolitical consequences of the drug wars and the growing sophistication of the cartels mean that the policy responses of the past are no longer adequate to solve the crisis."
"It's absolutely ridiculous that having ever consumed illicit drugs in your life could get you deported from the United States."
"Nobody's winning the war on drugs. It's as simple as that."
"The war on drugs has been a very, very bad mistake for the country, and I think some of the collateral damage... it's not the only thing going on with the rising imprisonment in the United States, but it's a major factor."
"You know what’s a solution? More law enforcement. You know what’s a solution? Mandatory drug drying out. You know what’s an actual solution? Involuntary commitment for the mentally ill."
"The potency of cannabis is a function of drug laws. Because if you look at alcohol prohibition, people just going out and having a beer and a wine, but once it became a black market, the criminals wanted to get the most bang for the buck."
"If drugs were all legally regulated, some drugs would be taken significantly less. For example, heroin, the most dangerous of drugs, because you would only ever have a medical model for heroin."
"Legalizing and decriminalizing drugs is a gimme."
"If we want to get to a society where we all share power equally, we are going to need to change our relationship with drugs too."
"Nobody wants someone's life to be ruined by drug use."
"Making sure that drug use doesn't get you thrown in jail, stop you from landing a job, and that you can get access to proper treatment if you want to is the way to do that."
"San Francisco would be the first American city to allow safe injection sites."
"The free market way to do that would be to allow cannabis and psilocybin to handle the mental health issues."
"Of the almost 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in the United States, one in five are locked up for a drug offense."
"I talk about prison overpopulation with non-violent drug offenders. I mean, marijuana being a schedule one drug, there's instances where if you sell enough of it you could be facing a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years."
"The whole war on drugs has got to be stopped."
"The politicians are such absolute hypocrites."
"Treating drugs as a health issue is how you should go."
"There's no good goddamn argument for continuing our drug policy."
"Decriminalizing drugs... The results from that have been spectacular."
"Decrim is kind of the worst of all worlds because it does nothing for the economic problems that people are facing."
"The more you can take the criminal justice system out of drug policy, the more you're bringing the public health system in."
"Legalizing cannabis would remove criminal intent."
"I bring to you HB 149 it decreases the criminal Penal for simple marijuana possession."
"Marijuana is an important remedy for many people...it's certainly much less dangerous than some of the opiates."
"No one should go to jail for a drug offense, no one should go to jail for the use of a drug, they should go to drug rehabilitation."
"Biden Administration is moving to loosen weed restrictions."
"We need to be revisiting all of these different paths to legalization and starting to strip away some of the unnecessary burdens and obstacles that are put for both consumers and producers of this perfectly reasonable and mostly harmless substance."
"Should all drugs be legalized? They should be legal, taxed, and regulated."
"Decriminalization of drugs... treating drug addiction as a health issue."
"The war on drugs has failed, ruining more lives than statistics can keep track of."
"No one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana."
"It's just so avoidable and it's truly one of the biggest conspiracies in this country that this was ever made illegal. It is, it's just sad."
"No one should be going to jail because they have a drug problem they should be going to rehabilitation not to jail."
"Legalize all drugs legalize pot in order to get that passed they generally aren't as forthcoming about the harms of marijuana."
"At long last, we are taking steps in the Senate to right the wrongs of the failed war on drugs."
"I think the writing is on the wall that legalization is coming."
"Marijuana should not be considered a drug; it should be legalized both recreationally and medically."
"Marijuana can be an effective treatment for chronic pain."
"There is absolutely no reason why marijuana should be illegal and stigmatized."
"Using cannabis is a really effective tool... and it doesn't kill anybody."
"The war on cannabis is disproportionately targeting poor people and communities of color."
"In my personal opinion, the only way that the war on drugs will be won is to legalize all drugs."
"Why do you think after all these years, after being the front runner of cannabis, and representing such a free place... why would they want to go backwards in cannabis?"
"Many of you have always considered yourself soldiers of this war on drugs."
"The harms of criminalization outweigh the harms of this drug."
"If we make this illegal we could see young people move on to much more harmful substances."
"Marijuana seizures are down, but my men and women so far this year have seized over ninety-one thousand pounds."
"Legalizing these other drugs, including marijuana, I don't think is the answer."
"I mean I don't think we could have imagined this 10 years ago where like a major corporate employer is like it's cool if you smoke weed and so what that's saying is we do not inhibit your performance."
"People are divided more by class than nationality."
"Personal use of marijuana shouldn't be criminal."
"We will decriminalize marijuana and we will expunge the records of those who have been convicted." - Senator Harris
"Legalize those drugs, treat drug addiction like a medical issue."
"It's about time the bloody British people legalized and decriminalized it here."
"Congratulations on becoming the largest city in America to decriminalize."
"The time is long overdue to end the so-called war on drugs."
"Drug legalization would make the cartels irrelevant. That was a lie, by the way."
"The Biden administration's Department of Health and Human Services is recommending that the DEA significantly loosen Federal restrictions on marijuana."
"I mean the West Coast has spoken—Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado. There is a movement here of states that have said, 'We as a policy matter think locking up people for marijuana is not helping the problem.'"
"And one of the things we get from getting that regulation, if we can stop that black market for cartel weed, we're gonna save a lot of wildlife."
"Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre."
"I think the war on drugs has been a colossal waste of money and a terrible disaster."
"The war on drugs, all that, everybody can say now that the war on drugs is wrong."
"The drug problem should be dealt with as a public health problem, not a criminal justice problem."
"There was an agenda... psychedelics got lumped in with heroin and truly hard and dangerous drugs."
"Psychedelics got lumped in with heroin and hard and dangerous drugs."
"Psychedelics should be accessible for self-healing, not just through medicalization or religious freedom."
"This isn't a war on drugs, this is a war on fentanyl. There's a war against poisonings and we can stop it."
"We must end the war on drugs that has disproportionately affected black and brown people."
"Criminalizing addicts is not the way to solve the overdose and drug crisis."
"I'm sick and tired of this national media and these national groups telling us that drugs are low-level and non-violent. I think we'll demonstrate to you in just a few minutes that it's anything other than low-level and non-violent."
"Changing the way that we classify drugs and how we criminalize all of that would probably be the second thing."
"The extremist movement of which JD Vance unfortunately is a part of right who says that the president of the United States is intentionally trying to kill people with fentanyl." - Tim Ryan
"The war on drugs needs to end... it's a war on a certain ethnicity."
"One day we want to take cannabis off schedule one. Yes, that's very important. Very important."
"Fentanyl got into this country and... it wasn't an overdose."
"Decriminalization worked in other places because it was paired with support and rehabilitation services."
"Let's fix our borders and let's secure our communities and stop American lives from being claimed by these fentanyl poisons and Other Drugs."
"The war on drugs destroys black communities and it needs to go."
"As far as ending the war on drugs, that's something I've really always been in favor of."
"I think we need to start by simply decriminalizing like Portugal does."
"Every time we arrest drug dealers or people who possess or use drugs it doesn't stop anything."
"Everything we're still hurting from - the drug war and intervention in the Middle East."
"Should a person be allowed to offer to sell you drugs? That would be the comparison."
"Drug dealers are in gangs. Let's bring on narcotics. Let's bring on the gang unit. Let's bring on the drug enforcement task force."
"Broadly speaking, I am for the legalization of Class A drugs."
"I don't think drug addicts should be in jail period..."
"How the hell do you arrest somebody for drugs that you never found?"
"The federal criminalization of marijuana dating back to 1951 cast marijuana as a social issue."
"I think we've been a little unfair towards conservatives and their concern that children would be ingesting harmful drugs."
"Nixon declared that these drugs were Public Enemy Number One."
"All drugs should be legalized, kids should be educated and not incarcerated, that's my philosophy."
"The war on drugs is tearing the fabric of society apart."
"There ought to be a special place in hell for fentanyl dealers."
"We need a sentencing scheme that reflects fentanyl's lethal force."
"Ending the drug war would end the violence, hitting the cartels in a hard way."
"Congress passed the comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988."
"I think of all drugs should be legal, even if they are extremely addictive and can potentially make the user become very violent."
"The government should execute themselves for dealing drugs."
"For the first time in three decades, drug overdose deaths have declined."
"I love the fact that you just came out as more libertarian than even me on the heroin thing because I I mean I talk about drugs in the book obviously and basically I agree you you want to maximize people's ability to do whatever they want."
"If you change the structure of the system you change the drug war you do all these but policy proposals that you and I are talking about."
"The War on Drugs has been rather a large failure."
"It is about class. The drug war is about class. Who we're punishing is about class."
"Legalized, regulated drugs are treated normally. They're treated as something which is a part of life."
"If you want as an adult to smoke a joint or maybe use cocaine, you should have, in my view, the right to do so with appropriate safeguards in place."
"I do worry... people who have suffered for so long in Latin and South America are excluded."
"Less white coke is not a thing... those stupid pseudo phrases from the right forget that."
"I'd rather get them clean and provide them opportunity as opposed to providing a safe space for them to continue to do drugs."
"Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear."
"The aim of legalization is to make these drugs boring."
"The Portuguese model works. We've now had twenty years of evidence. It's clear it works."
"The war on drugs was a war against black America."
"Money cannot be the obstacle. We need to take those tens of billions of dollars the drug companies made off of us, claw it all back, and then put it right back in our communities to help people get off the drugs."
"Marijuana prohibition isn't working. It's not preventing access for kids. It's not providing for public or consumer safety."
"It's about the future of the country that they are going to have. Are we better off legalizing more drugs, or are we better off preventing it in the first place and not going down the slippery slope?"
"We'll give people a fighting chance to try and get well over time when Portugal and other countries decriminalize these drugs they saw abuse rates go down they saw overdose rates go down they saw people get healthier more quickly."
"Decriminalization is not legalization... possession also remains illegal but you can no longer get a criminal record from possession."
"Is simple possession without committing any other crime truly worth ruining someone's life?"
"Stopping Fentanyl? Stop sending them our guns. Mexico has one gun store in the entire country."
"Pennsylvania once again arrives to the occasion to safeguard our nation from this Invasion that's right invasion of drugs from China it's a third Opium War look at our history there."
"I find that really interesting because what we're talking about is like switching out certain drugs for other drugs."
"Life-saving drugs can and should be squarely in the public domain because the public sector can make decisions about this based on people's needs not investor profits."
"The medicine saved my life. Drug users are human beings and as a human being we deserve to live."
"There needs to be an end to the war on drugs. That would solve an awful lot of problems."
"Completely descheduling marijuana should not be a scheduled drug at all."
"The decriminalization policy was implemented with the very intention of lowering the prevalence of drug abuse."
"People who are white and middle class can enjoy safe recreational drug use, while working-class individuals face harsher consequences."
"In 20, 30 years from now, when my son gets ready to come in the league, they might not even be testing for us mandatory smoke sessions."
"It's immensely entertaining, I don't know what it is about bludgeoning zombies endlessly, fun."
"Psychedelics are made a Schedule One drug in 1970."
"It's time to end the so-called war on drugs."
"We need to make it easy to get treatment and recovery and we need to make it hard to get drugs." - Robert Marbut Jr.
"Deal to crack down on fentanyl... pretty cool."
"The drug war should have been dead long ago."
"Ross led drugs, all drugs should be legalized."
"As much as this is a win, you know, like we're one step closer to decriminalizing it across the country."
"That's why this is also so important too is the research aspect of it."
"The psychedelic revolution is in full force, and drugs are rounding the curve of its victory lap in the war on drugs."
"Lack of care and concern across racial lines is responsible for the crack versus powder cocaine disparity."
"We need to talk about the reason a drug war has been waged and really reckon with the role race has played."
"Oregon became the first state to decriminalize hard drugs."
"Biden pardons thousands for simple possession of marijuana."
"The biggest most significant news here is that he also is looking at rescheduling marijuana."
"Deschedule marijuana, deschedule cannabis from a schedule one drug. Those people, all non-violent drug offenders should be allowed out of jail and their records should be expunged."
"The War on Drugs was winding down under the two terms of President Barack Obama."
"I support legalization, taxation, and regulation. But a lot hinges on that last word: regulation."
"Weed scheduled higher than fentanyl: absolutely ridiculous."
"Prohibition makes life worse for drug users by exposing them to the risk of violence and arrest."
"You cannot equate THC blood levels to impairments."
"The pharmacological effects of drugs are completely independent from whether or not they're illegal."
"We are going to end the so-called war on drugs and legalize marijuana in every state in the country."
"As a former user himself, I wanted to ask Richie his take on what the city could do to actually solve its drug problem. 'First and foremost, they have to enforce the drug laws that are on the books.'"
"Drug decriminalization in Portugal achieved a dramatic drop in HIV infections and overdose fatalities."
"Drug decriminalization in Portugal led to fewer incarcerations and arrests for drug-related offenses."
"Drug war is already racist from its beginnings in the Nixon administration."
"What do you think about weed being legal? Of course, it should definitely be legal."
"Decriminalize it because of that, and as I say, not one recorded death by overdose."
"The war on drugs has victimized millions of Americans."
"Our law enforcement people have become addicted to the money that flows from the federal government into local coffers through drug enforcement."
"Denver voters are deciding on decriminalizing magic mushrooms."
"Some of it is also the product of media hysteria - drugs are this moral dividing line between the worthy and the unworthy."
"We have an outsized sense of ownership over this problem, never mind the long and ugly history of our engagement with drug cartels."
"Oregon decriminalized drugs... they're treating it as a medical issue versus a criminal issue for the users of drugs."
"No matter how much you enforce the law of the land, you will never be able to enforce marijuana."
"We should legalize all drugs... people should be able to choose their intoxicant."
"The main problem with the war on drugs... it's evil, on the level of slavery."
"Focus on the things that actually matter... end the war on drugs, end qualified immunity."
"The drug war was never about drugs. It was about freedom and hypocrisy and privacy and corruption and racism."
"Far less harm would be done to this country by legalizing heroin than is now being done by trying to enforce heroin prohibition."
"No one should be in a federal prison solely due to the possession of marijuana."
"If we don't get very tough on these dealers, it's not going to happen, folks. It's not going to happen."
"The war on drugs is kind of a [__] show in itself."
"If you don't like the fentanyl coming through the Mexican drug cartels into the United States, you don't go to war with China, you close the border."
"When you make drugs illegal, you only outlaw sell drugs, you prop up illegal enterprises."
"Think about the drug crime that would drop as a result of this, the incarcerations that would drop as a result of this, and the massive amount of tax revenue that the United States could receive as a benefit of legalizing cannabis."
"As president, I will abolish mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses."