Drugs Quotes

“The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything—on terrorism, drugs, even poverty—has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be?”
― Glenn Greenwald, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

“Drugs, what a devil-inspired poison! It’s death on the installment plan.”
― David Wilkerson, The Cross and the Switchblade

“Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of most blessed power in those moments of pain and of langour, when the whole head is sore, and the whole heart sick. If those who rail indiscriminately at this species of composition, were to consider the quantity of actual pleasure it produces, and the much greater proportion of real sorrow and distress which it alleviates, their philanthropy ought to moderate their critical pride, or religious intolerance.”
― Walter Scott

“I thought over and over about what I was going to do when Carly overdosed and died. How would we go on? And then I knew: I wouldn’t go on. And then I realized that it was just going to be too painful to actually have to watch her die. Right in front of me. My daughter was dying. That’s when I snapped.”
― Dina Kucera, Everything I Never Wanted to Be: A Memoir of Alcoholism and Addiction, Faith and Family, Hope and Humor

“The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle". It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command the deference of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is observable that the women still in great measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to stimulants.”
― Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class

“I can't even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don't even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.”
― Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

“Tito snored away on the other bed. Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness… ”
― Thomas Pynchon

“Dale noticed a good amount of café patrons venomously staring at him as he returned to his table after the verbal altercation. He could care less about other people’s judgments, and most of these people weren’t even people. They were sub-people with sub-par ideologies, and he was willing to bet half of them didn’t even think that spectacle at the counter was reality, being that they were currently frying, stoned, blazed, tripping, or in some other way mentally incapacitated. Cocaine was the only drug Dale honored because it allowed him to retain his focus, didn’t cloud the mind with distortions, was expensive, and went hand in hand with any successful Wall Street executive.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“i finally got t this place were it feel right were i knew i belong were i didn't give crap maybe is not the right place but i feel save”
― Anita Rodriguez

“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

“When, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing (from East Coker)”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“I am an unapologetic drug user. I take drugs as part of my pursuit of happiness, and they work. I am a happier and better person because of them.”
― Carl Hart, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear

“Am I, Allen Ginsberg, the product of one of the CIA’s lamentable, ill-advised, or triumphantly successful experiments in mind control?”
― Allen Ginsberg, Poems all over the place, mostly 'seventies

“I once owned a pet octopus that I lost to the drug culture of Branson, Missouri. His name was Leonard, and now he's a prostitute working out of The Aquarium at The Boardwalk.”
― Jarod Kintz, Whenever you're here, I'm there for you

“There are no bad drugs. There's simply stupid people who don't know how to use them”
― Timothy Leary

“That was a defining fucking moment of my life. The moment I realized she wasn't coming back. That's when I learned you can never trust anybody, but you can always trust them to be who they are.
And my mom was a junkie.”
― Emily McIntire, Beneath the Stars

“Each time a new international conflict ignited, the Hosseini family knew the refugees would come. They were new types of warlords, preying on people's vulnerabilities, promising them kindness - money, food, accommodation, but ultimately, the only thing they delivered was a lifetime's addiction to heroin.”
― A.A. Dhand, The Chemist

“Alcohol is a straight-up hard drug. That’s not a moral judgment; it’s a scientific fact. On a biochemical level, alcohol affects the brain in the same way as Valium, Xanax, Ambien, GHB, and Quaaludes. All of them act on the GABA receptors in the brain and thus qualify as a type of drug called a GABAergic. Taking these drugs in small quantities can produce positive feelings and relaxation, but consuming too much can seriously mess you up. In fact, GABAergics can become so physically addictive that, in extreme cases, attempting to quit cold turkey can kill you.

But thanks to the wonders of advertising, people don’t think of alcohol that way. The beverage industry has spent billions of dollars to brainwash people into believing that drinking booze is fun and harmless: it’s how cool people socialize. Drinking makes you more popular and more confident, and if you play your cards right, it might even get you laid. As a result of this industrial-level gaslighting, it’s not uncommon for politicians to publicly proclaim that recreational drug use is morally repugnant and a blight on society—while simultaneously, those same politicians drink alcohol all the damn time.”
― Sam Kelly, Human History on Drugs: An Utterly Scandalous but Entirely Truthful Look at History Under the Influence

“What a noob thing to say. The first thing you learn if you use drugs on a regular basis is how to wear a convincing mask of normalcy—even if your brain is bathing in a sea of chemical trippiness. It’s called “hiding your power level”—a wonderful phrase coined by the writers of Dragon Ball Z.”
― Sam Kelly, Human History on Drugs: An Utterly Scandalous but Entirely Truthful Look at History Under the Influence

“In the ancient world too women schemed while men strategized; there was a great gulf, elemental and eternal, between the adventure and the adventuress. There was one too between virility and promiscuity: Caesar left Cleopatra in Alexandria to sleep with the wife of the king of Mauretania. Antony arrived in Tarsus fresh from an affair with the queen of Cappadocia. The consort of two men of voracious sexual appetite and innumerable sexual conquests, Cleopatra would go down in history as the snare, the delusion, the seductress. Citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts. In the same way it is easier to ascribe her power to magic than to love. We have evidence of neither, but the first can least be explained; with magic one forfeits rather than loses the game. So Cleopatra has Antony under her thumb, poised to obey her every wish, "not only because of his intimacy with her," as Josephus has it, "but also because of being under the influence of drugs." To claim as much is to acknowledge her power, also to insult her intelligence.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“I love drugs, but I hate hangovers, and the hatred of the hangover wins by a landslide every time.”
― Margaret Cho

“As Tom and I boarded a bus to Bangkok, I swallowed a couple of knock-off Valium pills I’d bought earlier at a local pharmacy to numb the agony of the long ride ahead. I was blasted out of my mind in the front seats, high up on the double-decker bus, forgetting to breathe at times, lost in the hazy depths of my mind. Tom yelled at me to get my shit together, and I tried to keep myself busy by playing games and challenging myself to hold my breath as long as possible. It felt like the Valium made time stand still, and I held my breath for what seemed like an eternity. But even that got old after a while, and the hours dragged on like an endless fever dream.
Then there I was, back in Bangkok again, wondering why the hell I kept coming back.”
― A.C. van Wonderen, Mad Monkeys: A Darkly Funny Novel

“Harry and I were now tubing side-by-side, and I could smell him—and he smelled bad.
“Hey, so you guys brought your own booze, aye?” he said. “That’s clever. Wanna know a trick I use to score free beers?”
For some reason, Harry always seemed to be low on cash, even though there were rumors going round that he was born into a wealthy family of British aristocrats.
“Sure,” I said.
With a mischievous grin, he then told me his secret plan. “You know, mate, when I’ve got just a bit of beer left in my glass, I give it a little rub with my fingers—running these two,” he said, holding up his index and middle fingers, “right through my butt crack. Then I walk up to the bartender, hold the glass under their nose, and say, ‘Apologies, but my beer seems to have an odd smell.’”
“My god, Harry…”
“Works like a charm—they always give me a fresh one on the house,” he said, giving me the most awkward wink in human history.”
― A.C. van Wonderen, Mad Monkeys: A Darkly Funny Novel

“Yo solo había leído sobre el LSD en un librito de Anais Nin titulado Collage. No era consciente de la cultura psicodelica que estaba floreciendo en aquel veranobde 1967. Tenía un concepto romántico de las drogas y las consideraba sagradas, reservadas a los poetas, a los músico de jazz y a los rituals indios.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“i indulge in many drugs,
seeking that high—
but the feed is the ultimate sky.
nothing beats the rush of dopamine,
mindlessly scrolling through the screen.”
― Revati, the void and the feed

“The are dosage guides and lists of possible side effects. Food interactions. Generic equivalents for the penny-pinchers. Overdose warnings too, but I usually ignore them. It's a step-by-step guide to self-medicating, sort of like The Anarchist Cookbook for manic depressives.”
― Pete Wentz, Gray

“Whether it's love or drugs, the first time is always the best. After that, you'll be forever chasing the dragon.”
― Ashish Kharloya, The Four-Year Transform: A Campus Comedy

“Do not try to mop your tears with whiskey or pop a pill to dry your eyes — those spirits will only ask you to dance until the sun rises.”
― Unknown Author

“It’s strange how it happens. One minute you’re kids, and the next there are drugs. We used to hang upside down from this same oak tree, knees hooked over the branches, making shapes out of passing clouds. Now I’m in the same branches with the same kid, and there’s a bong in his hands.”
― S. Tarulli

“Drugs created and killed the best artists in history”
― Tom Raaijmakers