"The effect of our drug policy on the health of people who use illicit drugs stem from four basic problems: a lack of information about medial hygiene, because our laws push drug users away from the medical professionals who can help them; no quality control regarding either the strength or purity of illicit drugs; the inability of many drug users to prepare and use injectable drugs under more medically hygienic conditions;… and the enormous pressure on drug addicts to engage in dangerous criminal activity, such as prostitution, burglary and drug dealing, in order to get the money to purchase these artificially expensive drugs."

“e will look back in astonishment that we allowed our former policy to persist for so long, much as we look back now at slavery, or Jim Crow laws, or the days when women were prohibited from voting.”

“The biggest oxymoron in our world today is the term ‘controlled substances.’ Why? Because as soon as you prohibit a substance, you give up control to the bad guys. That’s a huge problem we’ve inflicted upon ourselves.”

“‘It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he does not want to hear.’ To that comment I offer a corollary: ‘Friends tell friends the truth.’ The real problem in this area actually is not the drugs themselves. The real problem is that our citizens and our leaders simply will not look at the evidence, even though it is all around us. Our present policy is exacerbating the problems and will not stand up to scrutiny. What we really need to do is to open the subject to rigorous public debate.”

“The drug prohibitionists must have marijuana illegal, because without that, the raw numbers of the users of all other illegal drugs combined do not come even close to justifying the prison/industrial complex that has been spawned to "combat" this drug menace.”

“I had seen firsthand that we were wasting unimaginable amounts of our tax dollars, increasing crime and despair, and severely and unnecessarily harming people’s lives, particularly our children’s, by our failed drug policy. In short, I had seen that our drug laws were a failure, and I simply could not keep quiet about it any longer.”

“Since you 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?”