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Drug Quotes

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Drug Quotes

“The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture.”

“A "snapshot" feature in USA Today listed the five greatest concerns parents and teachers had about children in the '50s: talking out of turn, chewing gum in class, doing homework, stepping out of line, cleaning their rooms. Then it listed the five top concerns of parents today: drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. We can also add AIDS, poverty, and homelessness. . . . Between my own childhood and the advent of my motherhood--one short generation--the culture had gone completely mad.”

“When I started acting in the film industry when I was 16 years old, in 1980, I was going to all the revival theaters in Los Angeles. They were playing mostly films from the '60s and '70s, some from the early '20s and '30s, before that Hays commission. Those films did question things a lot, and there definitely was a switch in 1934. You can see very distinctly in 1934, it's harder to understand what the real culture was. Films made before 1934, you can really kind of see the racism, sexism, drug use, etc. that was going on at that time. And then it was all stopped.”

“I don't think drugs are a problem; I think they're a symptom. As long as Americans are empty, spiritually, emotionally, morally empty, they will need things like the drugs they choose to use. Mankind has wanted to change the way it felt from the beginning anyway. In this country there are even more reasons to want to feel different, to want to feel better, because this is such a neon sewer. This is such a degrading culture. It forces you to play Beethoven to your child in the uterus so that he will get into a better school and a better job and make more money so he can take care of you.”

“I simply don't like the culture of drugs. I never liked the hippies for it. I think it was a mistake to be all the time stoned and on weed. It didn't look right and it doesn't look right today either and the damage drugs have done to civilizations are too enormous. And besides, I don't need any drug to step out of myself. I don't want them and I do not need them.”

“The greatest number of drug addicts are to be found in Teheran and in Karachi, not in the West. Not in New York believe it or not. It's the same with the roles of slavery, racism and imperialism in the world. These institutions were present in other cultures. However, it was Western civilization which did something about slavery, about racism and voluntarily dissolved its empires leaving behind a very positive legacy of institutions not to mention buildings and roadways.”

“The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness , of fear and pleasure; it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.”

“I am convinced that if we lose kids to the culture of drugs and materialism, of violence and war, it's because we don't dare them, not because we don't entertain them. It's because we make the gospel too easy, not because we make it too difficult. Kids want to do something heroic with their lives, which is why they play video games and join the army. But what do they do with a church that teaches them to tiptoe through life so they can arrive safely at death?”

“I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.”

“I think a lot of people who were addicts are actually people who had that strong innate need to experience non-ordinary states of consciousness. But because our society has turned into this destructive culture of these horrible drugs that nullify you, they have that experience in a negative way. And then they lose that capacity forever, to have it in a positive way.”

“When someone tells me that they insist on having drinks with me, and there are some cultures where sealing the deal or celebrating or having a guest in the home, it is very traditional to slam down a couple shots or whatever the local grog is. I just tell them I'm allergic, which is not a lie, you know alcoholism and drug addiction in many ways are described as an allergy of the body and the mind. So I just tell them I'm allergic and they're like, "Oh, no problem."”

“I think the possibilities are endless in terms of what the genre would be like. However, in terms of looking for sources of money, I think we have to be very careful not to fall into Hollywood's commodification of Chicano culture. We could look at the example of Piri Thomas, a successful Puerto Rican writer now living in the Bay Area, who has received repeated offers from Hollywood...and he said he's not going to write about his people doing drugs and going to jail.”

“Music documentaries are hard to tell, but I think they're an amazing vehicle to look at racism, our attitude to sex, the way we judge drugs. There's the ability to get a big audience because of these incredible, iconic, charismatic people. You can look at a number of issues - the challenge is to make sure you choose something that has all those issues. Popular music is like a mirror of culture, of who we are.”

“There is a resentment and rejection of liberal culture. That culture is not available to many people in America. And the liberal coastal elite, who may never have been to rural America, just think everyone there is racist and homophobic and judge them to be terrible people. They think there is nothing wrong to be making jokes about 'meth heads', who are actually a group of people with poverty-related drug issues. They don't see their own hypocrisy. I think this is a huge issue and one that cannot be ignored.”

“We live in a culture of quick fixes. We want to feel better and we want to feel better now. I believe that's why many turn to alcohol and drugs because they want to numb the pain of life. In my life I have a choice. I can sit with my depression and look at Jesus or I can sit with Jesus and look at my depression. What I mean by that is I can focus on what's broken and wonder where God is or I can sit in the companionship of Christ who suffered for us and worship him in the middle of the mess. That gives my pain meaning and context.”

“I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.”