Cannabis Quotes

Abraham Lincoln: "Prohibition... goes beyond the bound of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded"

William F. Buckley, Jr. "Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."

Bill Clinton "When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale and never tried it again."

Barack Obama "When I was a kid I inhaled frequently. That was the point." (quoted on marijuana)

Jennifer Aniston "I enjoy smoking cannabis and see no harm in it."

Louis Armstrong "It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics . . . dope and all that crap. It's a thousand times better than whiskey - it's an assistant - a friend."

Arnold Schwarzenegger "That is not a drug. It's a leaf."

Albert Einstein "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." (quoted on hemp)

Jimmy Carter "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marihuana in private for personal use... Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marihuana."

Milton Friedman "When a private enterprise fails, it is closed down; when a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. Isn't that exactly what's been happening with drugs?"

Carl Sagan "The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world."

California Superior Court Judge Jim Gray "Did you know that, since the federal government first banned marijuana in 1937, usage in this country has gone up by about 4000% ?"

DEA Judge Francis Young "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man..."

Ronald Reagan "I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast."

DEA Chief Thomas Constantine "[In] my era everybody smoked and everybody drank and there was no drug use"

Richard Nixon "You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists."

LAPD Chief Darryl Gates "Casual drug users should be taken out and shot"

ONDCP Reauthorization Act of 1998 "The [ONDCP] Director ... shall ... take such actions as necessary to oppose any attempt to legalize the use of a substance (in any form) that (A) is listed in schedule I of section 202 of the Controlled Substances Act ..."

Meg Whitman: "I am absolutely against legalizing marijuana for any reason. We have enough challenges in our society without heading down the path of drug legalization."

Attorney General Jerry Brown: "We got to compete with China, and if everybody's stoned, how the hell are we going to make it?"

Pulizer Prize-winning science writer Natalie Angier: "All the women in my immediate family learned how to climax by smoking grass -- my mother when she was over thirty and already the mother of four. Yet I have never seen anorgasmia on the list of indications for the medical use of marijuana. Instead we are told that some women don't need to have orgasms to have a satisfying sex life, an argument as convincing as the insistence that homeless people like living outdoors."

Republican lawyer Jessica Corry: "It's generational child abuse to waste billions of dollars every year on marijuana prohibition."

H.L. Mencken quoted on alchohol prohibition: "Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished."