Legalization Quotes

“To ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you: something else is hurting you—that's why you need pot, or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think. Or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. Or Vietnam or Israel or the fear of spiders.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“The legalization of marijuana is not a dangerous experiment – the prohibition is the experiment, and it has failed dramatically, with millions of victims all around the world.”
― Sebastian Marincolo

“Prison is for rapists, thieves, and murderers. If you lock someone up for smoking a plant that makes them happy, then you're the fucking criminal.”
― Joe Rogan

“There has never been a 'war on drugs'! In our history we can only see an ongoing conflict amongst various drug users – and producers. In ancient Mexico the use of alcohol was punishable by death, while the ritualistic use of mescaline was highly worshipped. In 17th century Russia, tobacco smokers were threatened with mutilation or decapitation, alcohol was legal. In Prussia, coffee drinking was prohibited to the lower classes, the use of tobacco and alcohol was legal.”
― Sebastian Marincolo

“Gay rights aren't predicated on being born gay or having the right gene. Gay rights are predicated on having choice and consent. If you're a man and you can find another man that consents to have sex with you, it's the consent that gives you the right to have sex with him. Genetics are irrelevant when it comes to sexual rights. Just as gay rights are based on choice and consent, so are prostitution rights. All sexual rights are based on choice and consent.”
― Chester Brown, Paying for It

“The growing policy-reform movement is a broad church. It includes everyone from ganja-smoking Rastafarians to free-market fundamentalists and all in between. There are socialists who think the drug war hurts the poor, capitalists who see a business opportunity, liberals who defend the right to choose, and fiscal conservatives who complain America is spending $40 billion a year on the War on Drugs rather than making a few billion taxing it. The movement can’t agree on much other than that the present policy doesn’t work. People disagree on whether legalized drugs should be controlled by the state, by corporations, by small businessmen, or by grow-your-own farmers, and on whether they should be advertised, taxed, or just handed out free in white boxes to addicts.”
― Ioan Grillo, El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency

“Marijuana should be legalized. All drugs should be legalized. I'm tired of all the best party people being caged.”
― Thor Benson

“Once something is no longer illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“If you want to get to the heart of the dope problem, legalize it . . . [Prohibition is] a law, in operation, that can only be used against the poor.”
― James Baldwin

“The War on Drugs will go down in history as the most racist crusade since slavery.”
― Thor Benson

“If the solution to all of Africa’s illegal practices and crimes is to legalize them, then we are a doomed continent. Human trafficking; buying, selling, and consuming illegal addictive drugs; fraudulent financial transactions, computer hacking, identity theft—would legalizing these destructive behaviors improve society? If not, why would legalizing abortion improve the lives of Africans?”
― Obianuju Ekeocha, Target Africa: Ideological Neocolonialism in the Twenty-First Century

“What we need is not law-abiding love, but love-abiding law.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“Who were these people who were Nico's friends at that club? It seemed like an Italian-Spanish coffeeshop. I'm not sure, it was quite far from downtown in a pretty hidden location. I don't remember the name of the club or the street, but if I drive from Urgell I can find it. I took a few pictures outside the reception area while we were waiting outside with Adam to be allowed to enter after being registered as club members. They took our entry into the almost empty private club very seriously, unlike my girlfriend selling weed in their dispensary at age 20, when I just gave her a job elsewhere.
The pictures I took were of two skateboards hanging on the wall next to each other. They were spray-painted with smiling devilish faces, the comedy and tragedy masks.
(„Sock and buskin: The sock and buskin are two ancient symbols of comedy and tragedy. In ancient Greek theatre, actors in tragic roles wore a boot called a buskin (Latin cothurnus). The actors with comedic roles wore only a thin-soled shoe called a sock (Latin soccus).” – Source: Wikipedia)
There was another skateboard hanging on the wall, showing the devil smiling with his eyes and teeth and horns only visible in the darkness of the artwork. I doubt they were Italians – they were rather Spaniards – but I never really met anyone else from there besides Nico and Carulo. But I trusted Carulo; he was different. Carulo was a known person in Catalonia.
He was known to be the person who was sitting in the Catalan Parliament and rolled a joint and lit it up, smoking during a session as a protest against the law prohibiting marijuana growing and smoking in Spain. Nico told me when he introduced me to Carulo in the summer of 2013, almost a year earlier: “This is the guy you can thank for being able to smoke freely in Catalonia without the police bothering you. Tomas, meet Carulo.”
He never really ordered from me if I had met him before. He had no traffic; his growshop was always closed. He was only smoking inside with his younger brother, who was always walking his bull terrier.
Their white Bull Terrier was female, half the size of Chico, but she was kind of crazy; you could see in her eyes that she was not normal; she had mental issues. At least, looking into Carulo's eyes and his brother's eyes, I recognized the similar illness in their dog's eyes.
In 2014, it had been over four years since I had been working with dogs in my secondary job interpreting Italian and travelling every fifth weekend.
Additionally, Huns came to Europe with their animals, including their dogs. There are at least nine unique Hungarian dog breeds.”
― Tomas Adam Nyapi, BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA