Quotes about drugs

I don't respond well to mellow, you know what I mean, I have a tendency to... if I get too mellow, I ripen and then rot.

— Woody Allen

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.

— Antonin Artaud

Opiate. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.

— Ambrose Bierce

The whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers from the Watchtower itch: you gotta be with us, man, or you're out, you're dead. This pitch is a continual and seeming MUST with those who use the stuff. It's no wonder they keep getting busted.

— Charles Bukowski

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations -- wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

— Edmund Burke

Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.

— William S. Burroughs

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

— Jean Cocteau

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

— Salvador Dali

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.

— Philip K. Dick

There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment -- anywhere.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.

— Havelock Ellis

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.

— Sigmund Freud

Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you've been to some of those places, you think, How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?

— Jerry Garcia

No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm.

— Allen Ginsberg

Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine, jiggling your knees blankly in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.

— Allen Ginsberg

Thou source of all my bliss and all my woe, that found me poor at first, and keep me so.

— Oliver Goldsmith

Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won't be for our benefit but for the authorities . To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it.

— Germaine Greer

If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you're out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung. If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you're crazy. It can fix you so you can't play nothing or sing nothing.

— Billie Holiday

Of course drugs were fun.

— Anjelica Huston

Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?

— Aldous Huxley

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution -- then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

— Aldous Huxley

To punish drug takers is like a drunk striking the bleary face it sees in the mirror. Drugs will not be brought under control until society itself changes, enabling men to use them as primitive man did: welcoming the visions they provided not as fantasies, but as intimations of a different, and important, level of reality.

— Brian Inglis

Drugs are reality's legal loopholes.

— Jeremy P. Johnson

Words are the most powerful drugs used by mankind.

— Rudyard Kipling

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that's making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

— John Lennon

The worst drugs are as bad as anybody's told you. It's just a dumb trip, which I can't condemn people if they get into it, because one gets into it for one's own personal, social, emotional reasons. It's something to be avoided if one can help it.

— John Lennon

Did you know that the White House drug test is multiple choice?

— Rush Limbaugh

One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness -- the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.

— Norman Mailer

I learned why they're called wonder drugs -- you wonder what they'll do to you.

— Harlan Miller

Is marijuana addictive? Yes, in the sense that most of the really pleasant things in life are worth endlessly repeating.

— Richard Neville

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?

— P. J. O'Rourke

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

— P. J. O'Rourke

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

— P. J. O'Rourke

We're talking scum here. Air should be illegal if they breathe it.

— Policeman

Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!

— Thomas De Quincey

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.

— Ronald Reagan

I tried to give up drugs by drinking.

— Lou Reed

They shoulda called me Little Cocaine, I was sniffing so much of the stuff! My nose got big enough to back a diesel truck in, unload it, and drive it right out again.

— Little Richard

It is in the interests of our society to promote those things that take the edge off, keep us busy with our fixes, and keep us slightly numbed out and zombie like. In this way our modern consumer society itself functions as an addict.

— Anne W. Schaef

I don't believe in playing hurt, in taking injections to cover the pain.

— Monica Seles

It's an ordinary day for Brian. Like, he died every day, you know.

— Peter Townsend

In my day, we didn't have the cocaine, so we went out and knocked somebody over the head and took the money. But today, all this cocaine and crack, it doesn't give kids a chance.

— Barry White

Of all that Orient lands can vaunt, of marvels with our own competing, the strangest is the Haschish plant, and what will follow on its eating.

— John Greenleaf Whittier

Cocaine is God's way of saying you're making too much money.

— Robin Williams

The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.

— William Wordsworth

A drug is neither moral nor immoral -- it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole.

— Frank Zappa

Pharma industry is the art of making billions from milligrams.

— Gerhard Kocher