Drugs

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We are not drug addicts. We are not criminals. We are free men, and we will react to persecution the way free men have always reacted. ~ Arthur Kleps
The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs. ~ Thomas Szasz
When you smoke herb, herb reveal yourself to you. All the wickedness you do, the herb reveal itself to yourself, your conscience, show up yourself clear, because herb make you meditate. Is only a natural t'ing and it grow like a tree. ~ Bob Marley

Quotes[edit]

  • Drugs are tearing apart our societies, spawning crime, spreading diseases such as AIDS, and killing our youth and our future.
    • Kofi Annan, quoted in Young People and Drugs (April 8, 2003), Awake! magazine, published by Jehovah's Witnesses.

Cannabis[edit]

Main article: Cannabis
  • The Rastas, more than any other group, have elevated ganja to a central place in their religious practice and have developed a well-articulated ideology justifying its use and explaining its significance. ... Rastas regard the proscription of ganja use by Babylon's government as part of its strategy of social control.
  • When you smoke herb, herb reveal yourself to you. All the wickedness you do, the herb reveal itself to yourself, your conscience, show up yourself clear, because herb make you meditate. Is only a natural t'ing and it grow like a tree.
    • Bob Marley, as reported in Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History (2005), p. 366

Cocaine[edit]

Main article: Cocaine

Heroin[edit]

Main article: Heroin
  • Ros was dead. He had loved heroin more than it loved him.
    • Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

LSD[edit]

Main article: LSD
  • The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience.
    • Colin Wilson in Introduction to the New Existentialism. p. 88 (1966)

Methamphetamine[edit]

  • After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of the these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

Tobacco[edit]

Main article: Tobacco
  • A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.
  • I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

Prescription drugs[edit]

Main article: Medicine
  • Although previously the monoamine systems were considered to be responsible for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD), the available evidence to date does not support a direct causal relationship with MDD. There is no simple direct correlation of serotonin or norepinephrine levels in the brain and mood. In other words, after a half-century of research, the chemical-imbalance hypothesis as promulgated by the drug companies that manufacture SSRIs and other antidepressants is not only without clear and consistent support, but has been disproved by experimental evidence.
  • Irving Kirsch (2010). The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. p. 92.
  • Lydia: [About her stepmother, Delia] She's sleeping with Prince Valium tonight.
    • Beetlejuice, written by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren

Altered state of consciousness[edit]

  • Fly Chick
    Light It
    Going pay all day
    But won't ever get away
    From skinny white pimp
  • Atmosphere, in "The Skinny".
  • Life is a waste of time,
    and some say time is a waste of life,
    but if you get wasted all the time,
    then you might just have the time of your life
    • Drapht, "Boom Boom Boom", 'Brothers Grimm' (2008).
  • Lets go home and get stoned
    We could end up makin love instead of misery
    Go home and get stoned
    Cause the sex is so much better when you're mad at me
    • Hinder, "Get Stoned", 'Extreme Behavior' (2005).
  • I've come to decide, that the things that I tried, were in my life just to get high on.
  • It's such a waste to be wasted in the first place
  • Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
    We know Major Tom's a junkie
    Strung out in heaven's high
    Hitting an all-time low
  • Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good,
    They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would.
    They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to go home.
    Then they'll stone ya when you're there all alone.
    But I would not feel so all alone,
    Everybody must get stoned.
  • Ride, ride my see-saw.
    Take my place
    On this trip
    Just for me
    Ride, take a free ride
    Take my place
    Have my seat
    It's for free
  • And you can fly
    High as a kite if you want to
    Faster than light if you want to
    Speeding through the universe
    Thinking is the best way to travel

Drugs and the Law[edit]

  • Now it's 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?
  • Since you [US "drug czar" McCaffrey] control a federal budget that has just been increased from $17.8 billion last year to $19.2 billion this year, is asking people like you if we should continue with our nation's current drug policy like a person asking a barber if one needs a haircut?
    • Judge James P. Gray, Orange County California, LA Times, March 29, 2000.
  • Congress should definitely consider decriminalizing possession of marijuana... We should concentrate on prosecuting the rapists and burglars who are a menace to society.
    • Dan Quayle, U.S. Representative and Vice President under President Bush, 1977
    • Source: Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (1996).
  • The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture.
  • The centerpiece of the cultural counterrevolution is the snowballing campaign for a "drug-free workplace" — a euphemism for "drug-free workforce," since urine testing also picks up for off-duty indulgence. The purpose of this '80s version of the loyalty oath is less to deter drug use than to make people undergo a humiliating ritual of subordination: "When I say pee, you pee." The idea is to reinforce the principle that one must forfeit one's dignity and privacy to earn a living, and bring back the good old days when employers had the unquestioned right to demand that their workers' appearance and behavior, on or off the job, meet management's standards.
    • Ellen Willis, "Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs," The Village Voice (September 19, 1989).
  • Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong — and demonstrably more destructive — for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.
  • Importantly, there is nothing in the Constitution — by which, under Article 6, Section 2, officials at every level of government are obligated to abide — that authorizes the banning of any substance or enforcing that ban with the threat of injury, incarceration, or death. The lawful powers of the federal government are enumerated in Article 1, Section 8, and they do not include forbidding drugs or any other substance. Politicians early in the 20th century understood this, and passed a Constitutional amendment allowing them to outlaw alcohol. No such amendment has ever been passed, or even proposed, with regard to drugs.
  • The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.
  • Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.
  • I remember when the U.S. had a drug problem and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore.
  • We are not drug addicts. We are not criminals. We are free men, and we will react to persecution the way free men have always reacted.
    • Reverend Arthur Kleps, testifying before the Special Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Narcotics, May 25, 1966, as cited in Walter Houston Clark, Chemical Ecstasy (1969), p. 140.
  • Called "Rauschgiftbekaempfung," The Combatting of Drugs, the term also acquired a more popular meaning closer to 'War on Dope.' This extremely cruel and often arbitrary prohibitionist campaign of National Socialist racial hygiene can be viewed as a precursor to the U.S. War on Drugs, which is itself busily mobilizing the entire police state to root out the demonized forces of foreign 'narco-terrorism' threatening the performance principle of Late Capital's global sweat shop.
    • Scott J. Thompson, "From 'Rausch' to Rebellion: Walter Benjamin's On Hashish and the Aesthetic Dimensions of Prohibitionist Realism"

Philosophical views of drug use[edit]

  • These debates gave rise to the notion of pharmacological Calvinism. As framed by Gerald Klerman, this notion referred to the fact that treatments which made the taker feel good, without hard work being required, are commonly perceived to be morally bad and are likely to be accompanied by some form of secular retribution.
    • David Healy, The Creation of Psychopharmacology (2002), p. 354
  • La Mettrie anticipated the outlines of the world into which we are now moving. In particular, he envisioned philosophical speculation withering once it became possible to intervene effectively at the biological level to change human behavior. At this point, physicians would replace philosophers as the arbiters of human ethics.
    • David Healy, The Creation of Psychopharmacology (2002), p. 358
  • There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.
  • Is there any doubt that drug addiction is an escape from an unbearable inner state - from a reality that one cannot deal with - from an atrophying mind one can never fully destroy? If Apollonian reason were unnatural to man, and Dionysian intuition brought him closer to nature and truth, the apostles of irrationality would not have to resort to drugs. Happy, self-confident men do not seek to get stoned. Drug addiction is the attempt to obliterate one's consciousness, the quest for a deliberately-induced insanity. As such, it is so obscene and evil that any doubt about the moral character of its practitioners is itself an obscenity.
  • There are those who are so tightly meshed within physical reality that the soul is squeezed dry. They are tight, sore, and chafing beneath too-severe habits and ideas. For them momentary release, such as the drugs can give is highly beneficial.
    • Jane Roberts in The Early Sessions: Book 8, Session 362, Page 116.

The disease model for drug use[edit]

There is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. … Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness—even for the sake of our virtue—and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
  • If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes.
  • The popular medical formulation of morality that goes back to Ariston of Chios, "virtue is the health of the soul," would have to be changed to become useful, at least to read: "your virtue is the health of your soul." For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the "equality of men," the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men. Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul.
  • Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness—even for the sake of our virtue—and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness.
  • Unless you perfectly understand the principle from which anyone acts, how should you know if he acts ill?

Other[edit]

  • Not only our well-being, but the well-being of our sons and grandsons depends on disseminating patterns of "sobriae ebrietas" (sober inebriation), which reconsider the use of psychedelic drugs as a moral and aesthetic challenge.
    • Antonio Escohotado, "Inebriation as Experience of the Spirit".
  • I like the FedEx driver, because he's drug dealer and he don't even know it. And he's always on time!
    • Mitch Hedberg, Track 10: "Sesame Seeds," Mitch All Together (2003).
  • All you kiddies remember to lay off the needle drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.
  • MDMA got you feeling like a champion, The city never sleeps better slip you a Ambien.
    • Jay-Z, "Empire State of Mind".
  • The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time … Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers -- common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.
  • Hiya kids. Here's an important message from your Uncle Bill. Don't buy drugs. Become a rock star, and they give you them for free!
  • In vino veritas.
    • In wine, there is the truth.
    • Roman proverb
  • O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!
  • My head hurts, this shit isn't getting me high
    My chest is so tight, am I going to die?
    My stomachs in knots, as the room starts to spin
    As I wait for this Valium to slowly kick in.
    • Staind, "Pressure", 'Break The Cycle' (2001).
  • There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
  • This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel ... total lack of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue — severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it.
  • You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug – especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes.
  • Ketamine was introduced by God to give dead people a means of communicating with us, the living.
  • A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.

References[edit]

  1. ↑ Burns, Jennifer (2009). Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-532487-7. OCLC 313665028. p. 85

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

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