<p>
<img src="https://www.420magazine.com/gallery/data/500/user003.gif" align=left>"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
</p>
"Mistrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong." Friedrich Nietzsche
"First they ignore you; then they mock you; then they punish you; then you win." Mahatma Ghandi
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
"Since you [US "drug tsar" 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 Country, California
"You're asking the government to control individual morality.
This is a government that can't buy a toilet seat for under $600." Peter McWilliams - Author of "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do"
"Our youth can not understand why society chooses to criminalize a behavior with so little visible ill effect or adverse social impact... These young people have jumped the fence and found no cliff. And the disrespect for the possession laws fosters a disrespect for laws and the system in general... On top of this is the distinct impression among the youth that some police may use the marihuana laws to arrest people they don't like for other reasons, whether it be their politics, their hair style or their ethnic background."
"Federal and state laws (should) be changed to no longer make it a crime to possess marijuana for private use."
"State laws should make the public use of marijuana a criminal offense punishable by a $100 fine. Under federal law, marijuana smoked in public would merely be subject to seizure." President Richard M. Nixon's National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse
"Criminal penalties have clearly failed to prevent widespread use of marijuana... Law and health are two entirely separate issues." Bob DuPont - Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse - President Nixon's 'drug czar'
"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 [28g] of marihuana." Jimmy Carter - U.S. President
"The existing evidence on policies of partial prohibition [decriminalization] indicates that partial prohibition has been as effective in controlling consumption as complete prohibition and has entailed considerably smaller social, legal, and economic costs. On balance, therefore, we believe that a policy of partial prohibition is clearly preferable to a policy of complete prohibition of supply and use.
We believe, further) that current policies directed at controlling the supply of marijuana should be seriously reconsidered. The demonstrated ineffectiveness of control of use through prohibition of supply and the high costs of implementing such a policy make it very unlikely that any kind of partial prohibition policy will be effective in reducing marijuana use significantly below present levels. (...) Hence, a variety of alternative policies should be considered." - National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Science
"Western governments ... will lose the war against dealers unless efforts are switched to prevention and therapy... All penalties for drug users should be dropped ... Making drug abuse a crime is useless and even dangerous ... Every year we seize more and more drugs and arrest more and more dealers but at the same time the quantity available in our countries still increases... Police are losing the drug battle worldwide." - Raymond Kendall - secretary general of INTERPOL
"The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana [1 ounce = 28g] in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy." - William F. Buckley
"So long as large sums of money are involved - and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal - it is literally impossible to stop the traffic, or even to make a serious reduction in its scope."
"Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combatting other forms of crime. We would thus strike a double blow: reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention." Milton Friedman - Nobel prize winner
And here we come to the vital distinction between the advocacy of temperance and the advocacy of prohibition. Temperance and self-control are convertible terms. Prohibition, or that which it implies, is the direct negation of the term self-control. In order to save the small percentage of men who are too weak to resist their animal desires, it aims to put chains on every man, the weak and the strong alike. And if this is proper in one respect, why not in all respects? Yet, what would one think of a proposition to keep all men locked up because a certain number have a propensity to steal? -Felix Mendelsohn, 1915
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. - George Santayana, "The Life of Reason"
I'd rather that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober. With freedom we might in the end attain sobriety, but in the other alternative we should eventually lose both freedom and sobriety. W.C. Magee, Archbishop of York
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. - C.S. Lewis
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. - John Stuart Mill
Whenever the offense inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigor of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind. - Edward Gibbon, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,"
The passing of an unjust law is the suicide of authority. - Pastoral Letter of the American Roman Catholic Hierarchy
Abusus non tollit usum. [Abuse is no argument against proper use.] -- Latin proverb
If you say, "Would there were no wine" because of the drunkards, then you must say, going on by degrees, "Would there were no steel," because of the murderers, "Would there were no night," because of the thieves, "Would there were no light," because of the informers, and "Would there were no women," because of adultery. - St. John Chrysostom, "Homilies," circa 388
The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. 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"
Corruptisima republica plurimae leges. [The more corrupt a republic, the more laws.] - Tacitus, Annals III 27
Republic . . . it means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose. - John Wayne
A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them. - H. L. Mencken, 1918
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. - Saul Bellow
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader. - Plato
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. - Herbert Spencer
Crime is contagious....if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law. - Justice Louis Brandeis
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
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
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. - Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience,"
The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are constitutional rights secure. - Albert Einstein
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. - James A. Michener
If the doors of perception were cleansed
every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things
thru' narrow chinks of his cavern. - William Blake
All war is based on deception. - "The Art of War," by Sun Tzu
. . . In any war, the first casualty is common sense, and the second is free and open discussion. -- James Reston, The New York Times, 1965
The first casualty when war comes is the truth. -- California Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917
The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is. -- Winston Churchill
When even one American - who has done nothing wrong - is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril. -- Harry S. Truman
There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it. -- Martin Luther King Jr.
When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny. -- Thomas Jefferson
It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error. -- U.S. Supreme Court, in American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382,442
The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind. -- Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men. -- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That is the essence of inhumanity. -- George Bernard Shaw
We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt and that it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past. . .while we silence the rebels of the present. -- H.S. Commager
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
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. -- Seneca, A.D. 65
<img src="https://www.420magazine.com/gallery/data/500/user003.gif" align=left>"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
</p>
"Mistrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong." Friedrich Nietzsche
"First they ignore you; then they mock you; then they punish you; then you win." Mahatma Ghandi
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
"Since you [US "drug tsar" 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 Country, California
"You're asking the government to control individual morality.
This is a government that can't buy a toilet seat for under $600." Peter McWilliams - Author of "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do"
"Our youth can not understand why society chooses to criminalize a behavior with so little visible ill effect or adverse social impact... These young people have jumped the fence and found no cliff. And the disrespect for the possession laws fosters a disrespect for laws and the system in general... On top of this is the distinct impression among the youth that some police may use the marihuana laws to arrest people they don't like for other reasons, whether it be their politics, their hair style or their ethnic background."
"Federal and state laws (should) be changed to no longer make it a crime to possess marijuana for private use."
"State laws should make the public use of marijuana a criminal offense punishable by a $100 fine. Under federal law, marijuana smoked in public would merely be subject to seizure." President Richard M. Nixon's National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse
"Criminal penalties have clearly failed to prevent widespread use of marijuana... Law and health are two entirely separate issues." Bob DuPont - Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse - President Nixon's 'drug czar'
"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 [28g] of marihuana." Jimmy Carter - U.S. President
"The existing evidence on policies of partial prohibition [decriminalization] indicates that partial prohibition has been as effective in controlling consumption as complete prohibition and has entailed considerably smaller social, legal, and economic costs. On balance, therefore, we believe that a policy of partial prohibition is clearly preferable to a policy of complete prohibition of supply and use.
We believe, further) that current policies directed at controlling the supply of marijuana should be seriously reconsidered. The demonstrated ineffectiveness of control of use through prohibition of supply and the high costs of implementing such a policy make it very unlikely that any kind of partial prohibition policy will be effective in reducing marijuana use significantly below present levels. (...) Hence, a variety of alternative policies should be considered." - National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Science
"Western governments ... will lose the war against dealers unless efforts are switched to prevention and therapy... All penalties for drug users should be dropped ... Making drug abuse a crime is useless and even dangerous ... Every year we seize more and more drugs and arrest more and more dealers but at the same time the quantity available in our countries still increases... Police are losing the drug battle worldwide." - Raymond Kendall - secretary general of INTERPOL
"The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana [1 ounce = 28g] in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy." - William F. Buckley
"So long as large sums of money are involved - and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal - it is literally impossible to stop the traffic, or even to make a serious reduction in its scope."
"Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combatting other forms of crime. We would thus strike a double blow: reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention." Milton Friedman - Nobel prize winner
And here we come to the vital distinction between the advocacy of temperance and the advocacy of prohibition. Temperance and self-control are convertible terms. Prohibition, or that which it implies, is the direct negation of the term self-control. In order to save the small percentage of men who are too weak to resist their animal desires, it aims to put chains on every man, the weak and the strong alike. And if this is proper in one respect, why not in all respects? Yet, what would one think of a proposition to keep all men locked up because a certain number have a propensity to steal? -Felix Mendelsohn, 1915
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. - George Santayana, "The Life of Reason"
I'd rather that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober. With freedom we might in the end attain sobriety, but in the other alternative we should eventually lose both freedom and sobriety. W.C. Magee, Archbishop of York
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. - C.S. Lewis
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. - John Stuart Mill
Whenever the offense inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigor of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind. - Edward Gibbon, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,"
The passing of an unjust law is the suicide of authority. - Pastoral Letter of the American Roman Catholic Hierarchy
Abusus non tollit usum. [Abuse is no argument against proper use.] -- Latin proverb
If you say, "Would there were no wine" because of the drunkards, then you must say, going on by degrees, "Would there were no steel," because of the murderers, "Would there were no night," because of the thieves, "Would there were no light," because of the informers, and "Would there were no women," because of adultery. - St. John Chrysostom, "Homilies," circa 388
The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. 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"
Corruptisima republica plurimae leges. [The more corrupt a republic, the more laws.] - Tacitus, Annals III 27
Republic . . . it means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose. - John Wayne
A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them. - H. L. Mencken, 1918
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. - Saul Bellow
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader. - Plato
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. - Herbert Spencer
Crime is contagious....if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law. - Justice Louis Brandeis
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
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
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. - Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience,"
The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are constitutional rights secure. - Albert Einstein
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. - James A. Michener
If the doors of perception were cleansed
every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things
thru' narrow chinks of his cavern. - William Blake
All war is based on deception. - "The Art of War," by Sun Tzu
. . . In any war, the first casualty is common sense, and the second is free and open discussion. -- James Reston, The New York Times, 1965
The first casualty when war comes is the truth. -- California Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917
The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is. -- Winston Churchill
When even one American - who has done nothing wrong - is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril. -- Harry S. Truman
There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it. -- Martin Luther King Jr.
When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny. -- Thomas Jefferson
It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error. -- U.S. Supreme Court, in American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382,442
The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind. -- Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men. -- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That is the essence of inhumanity. -- George Bernard Shaw
We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt and that it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past. . .while we silence the rebels of the present. -- H.S. Commager
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
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. -- Seneca, A.D. 65
