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Billie brought herself up on the streets of Baltimore, alone, defiant. It was the last city without a sewer system in the United States,115 and she spent her childhood among clouds of stinking smoke116 from all the burning shit.
Billie [Holiday] brought herself up on the streets of Baltimore, alone, defiant. It was the last city without a sewer system in the United States, and she spent her
childhood among clouds of stinking smoke from all the burning shit."
When Billie sang “Loverman, where can you be?”153 she wasn’t crying for a man—she was crying for heroin.
An official government study18 found that before drug prohibition properly kicked in, three quarters of self-described addicts (not just users—addicts) had steady and respectable jobs.
Whenever any representative of another country tried to explain to him why these policies weren’t right for them, Anslinger snapped: “I’ve made up my mind—don’t11 confuse me with the facts.”
“I’ve made up my mind—don’t confuse me with the facts.” - Harry Anslinger
It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear.
there are in reality two drug wars going on: there is the war on drugs, where the state wages war on the users and addicts, and then there is the war for drugs,64 where the criminals fight each other to control the trade.
"There are in reality two drug wars going on: there is the war on drugs, where the state wages war on the users and addicts, and then there is the war for drugs, where the criminals fight each other to control the trade."
And at every level, there is a war on drugs, a war for drugs, and a culture of terror, all created by prohibition.
Ovid said drug-induced ecstasy was a divine gift.
Hallucinogens and chemicals caused by burning cannabis were found in clay pipe fragments from William Shakespeare’s house.
Interesting! That explains the lunacy of The Tempest.
The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug—and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs.
the government gives a hefty yearlong tax break to anybody who employs a recovering addict. Almost always, when the year is up, the employer keeps the former addict on in his garage or bakery or shop, because she has turned out to be a good worker.
This is the policy in Switzerland.
the Portuguese alternative is based on the belief that drugs aren’t going away, so you need instead to give people the internal tools—the confidence, the knowledge, the support—to make the right decisions for themselves.
Portugal is the first country to decriminalize - not legalize - all drugs.
I have complained in this book that the people who support the drug war sometimes use propaganda to promote their cause, so it’s important that I resist the temptation to produce propaganda of my own.
