The War On Drugs Is Lost (1995)
Context: More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted.
This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of those drugs. Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000. The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars, whatever. We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000.
Larry Sanger (1968) American former professor, co-founder of Wikipedia, founder of Citizendium and other projects
"Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias" at kuro5hin (25 July 2001) https://web.archive.org/web/20010814102033/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/25/103136/121
Richard Koch (1950) German medical historian and internist
Source: The 80/20 principle: the secret of achieving more with less (1999), p. 103
Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project
2000s, Thus Spake Stallman (2000)
Context: The War on Drugs has continued for some 20 years, and we see little prospect of peace, despite the fact that it has totally failed and given the US an imprisonment rate almost equal to Russia. I fear that the War on Copying could go on for decades as well. To end it, we will need to rethink the copyright system, based on the Constitution's view that it is meant to benefit the public, not the copyright owners. Today, one of the benefits the public wants is the use of computers to share copies.
“To the addicted, money is like cocaine: Too much is never enough.”
David Cay Johnston (1948) Investigative journalist and author
Free Lunch (2007)
“What theology that would have been, a god self-worshipping, a drug addicted to itself.”
Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 18 (p. 239)
Byron White (1917–2002) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, American football player
Harmelin v. Michigan 501 U.S. 957 at 1023 (1991).
Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest
Miller Newton (1981). ‘’Gone Way Down: Teenage Drug-Use is a Disease,’’ American Studies Press, Tampa, FL, pg 30.
On Teenage Drug Use
Peter Cook (1937–1995) British architect
Caption to a cartoon drawn by Roger Law, published in The Observer (8 July 1962)
Stefan Molyneux (1966) libertarian philosopher, writer, speaker, and online broadcaster
Speech at International Conference on Men's Issues, St. Clair Shores, Michigan, June 28, 2014, quoted in "What I Learned as a Woman at a Men's-Rights Conference" https://time.com/2949435/what-i-learned-as-a-woman-at-a-mens-rights-conference/, Time (July 2, 2014)
