A lot of highly evolved people have proudly used cannabis for a long time—and many others who may not use it are at least wise and compassionate enough to stand up for an end to prohibition—from America’s founding fathers to the leader of the evangelical church. That’s right, George Washington grew it, and Pat Robertson wants Uncle Sam to legalize it! Read these inspiring words of wisdom, and use these quotes when making your case to the unenlightened.
“We shall, by and by, want a world of hemp more for our own consumption.”
—John Adams
“I was a heavy drinker, but the alcohol affected my heart rather than my liver. So I stopped. I smoke grass now. I say that to everybody, because marijuana should be legalized. It’s ridiculous that it isn’t. If at the end of the day I feel like smoking a joint, I do it. It changes the perception of what I’ve been through all day.”
—Robert Altman
“I enjoy smoking cannabis and see no harm in it.”
—Jennifer Aniston
“It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics . . . dope and all that crap. It’s a thousand times better than whiskey—it’s an assistant, a friend.”
—Louis Armstrong
“You bet I did [inhale marijuana]—and I enjoyed it.”
—Mayor Michael Bloomberg
“We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in refrigerator at every opportunity to ‘conceptualize.’ Hardly a decision was made without drugs.”
—Anthony Bourdain
“It was absolutely about pot. . . . We were trying to be the Cheech and Chong of punk rock.”
—Billie Joe Armstrong, on the meaning of “Green Day”
“Usually around Christmastime is when the harvest comes in, and somebody will say, ‘Hey! Look what I’ve got!’”
—Jeff Bridges
“By any of the major criteria of harm—mortality, morbidity, toxicity, addictiveness and relationship with crime—cannabis is less harmful than any of the other major illicit drugs, or than alcohol or tobacco.”
—British Police Foundation
“There is only one thing wrong with drug law enforcement, just one—it doesn’t work. And when I tell you this I want you to believe me because I have done it.”
—U.S. Federal Judge Volney Brown Jr.
“Marijuana is rejected all over the world. Damned. In England heroin is alright for outpatients, but marijuana? They’ll put your ass in jail. I wonder why that is? The only reason could be: To Serve the Devil—Pleasure! Pleasure, which is a dirty word in Christian culture.”
—Lenny Bruce
“Narcotics police are an enormous, corrupt international bureaucracy . . . and now fund a coterie of researchers who provide them with ‘scientific support’ . . . fanatics who distort the legitimate research of others. . . . The anti-marijuana campaign is a cancerous tissue of lies, undermining law enforcement, aggravating the drug problem, depriving the sick of needed help, and suckering well-intentioned conservatives and countless frightened parents.”
—William F. Buckley
“I was arrested for possession and cultivation of marijuana in the early ’70s, and it was thrown out. The judge asked me how I felt about it, and I said, ‘I understand the law, and I want you to know I’ll pay the fine, but I cannot guarantee I will not break this law again.’ He really chewed me out for that.”
—George Carlin
“Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use. . . . Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana.”
—Jimmy Carter
“I don’t do drugs . . . just weed.”
—Dave Chapelle
“It’s not even the drugs that will kill you man. What really kills you is looking for drugs.”
—Tommy Chong
“When you return to this mundane sphere from your visionary world, you would seem to leave a Neapolitan spring for a Lapland winter—to quit paradise for earth—heaven for hell! Taste the hashish, guest of mine—taste the hashish!”
—Alexander Dumas
“I think America’s view on weed is ridiculous. I mean, are you kidding me? If everyone smoked weed, the world would be a better place.”
—Kirsten Dunst
“The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.”
—Albert Einstein
“I say legalize drugs because I want to see less drug abuse, not more. And I say legalize drugs because I want to see the criminals put out of business.”
—Edward Ellison, Scotland Yard
“Free Marc.”
—Everyone
“Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?”
—Henry Ford
“If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.”
—Milton Friedman
“I smoke a lot of pot when I write music.”
—Lady Gaga
“Pot.”
—Zach Galifianakis
“Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.”
—Allen Ginsberg
“If John Lennon is deported, I’m leaving too . . . with my musicians . . . and my marijuana.”
—Art Garfunkel
“We’re here to do something historic. Around the issue of social justice, I go to a great number of incarceration houses where I see men and women incarcerated for a small amount of marijuana. Their lives are being changed and impacted, it’s been catastrophic.”
—Danny Glover
“I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it.”
—God
“Marijuana doesn’t make me do anything that I wouldn’t be capable of doing otherwise. I find it far more pleasant than drinking, less messy and more private. I never had the patience to sit in a bar and drink. Having a joint is far more economical and more immediate. I’m able to switch into certain inner places with marijuana.”
—Elliot Gould
“It is beyond my comprehension that any humane person would withhold such a beneficial substance [marijuana] from people in such great need simply because others use it for different purposes.”
—Stephen Jay Gould
“Since you [U.S. ‘Drug Czar’ Barry McCaffrey] control a federal budget that has just been increased from $17.8 billion last year to $19.2 billion this year, is asking people like you if we should continue with our nation’s current drug policy like a person asking a barber if one needs a haircut?”
—Judge James P. Gray, Orange County, CA
“Many medical marijuana patients are too sick to grow their own. . . . It is time to show compassion and common sense. The people getting hurt in all of this are patients. They have a prescription from a doctor but they can’t get it filled.”
—Washington Governor Christine Gregoire
“Marijuana is one of the least-toxic substances in the whole pharmacopoeia.”
—Professor Lestor Grinspoon, Harvard Med School
“I’ve seen it printed that I’m a marijuana activist, and I understand that, but it’s really just something I enjoy.”
—Woody Harrelson, marijuana activist
“If you substitute marijuana for tobacco and alcohol, you’ll add eight to twenty-four years to your life.”
—Jack Herer
“Why is pot against the law? It wouldn’t be because anyone can grow it, and therefore you can’t make a profit off it, would it?”
—Bill Hicks
“Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.”
—Aldous Huxley
“Legalize cannabis? Why? As far as I’m concerned, it’s already fucking legal, so what’s the point?”
—Jamiroquai
“Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth and protection of the country.”
—Thomas Jefferson
“Western governments . . . will lose the war against dealers unless efforts are switched to prevention and therapy. . . . All penalties for drug users should be dropped. . . . Making drug abuse a crime is useless and even dangerous. . . . Every year we seize more and more drugs and arrest more and more dealers but at the same time the quantity available in our countries still increases. . . . Police are losing the drug battle worldwide.”
—Raymond Kendall, Secretary General of Interpol
“To be just without being mad (and the madder you get the madder you get), to be peaceful without being stupid, to be interested without being compulsive, to be happy without being hysterical . . . smoke grass.”
—Ken Kesey
“In any civilized society, it is every citizen’s responsibility to obey just laws. But at the same time, it is every citizen’s responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.
“I think that marijuana should not only be legal, I think it should be a cottage industry. It would be wonderful for the state of Maine. There’s some pretty good homegrown dope. I’m sure it would be even better if you could grow it with fertilizers and have greenhouses.”
—Stephen King
“Whatever I’m already doing becomes enhanced when I smoke pot.”
—Chrissie Hynde
“It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country. My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other addictive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers.”
—Andrew Lahde
“They’ve outlawed the number-one vegetable on the planet.”
—Dr. Timothy Leary
“Smoking’s a way to let you down slowly from a ballgame. It also makes you use less of the resources around. It makes people better in the way they act towards society. Everybody’s nicer. It’s hard to be mean when you’re stoned.”
—Bill “Spaceman” Lee
“Prohibition . . . goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”
—Abraham Lincoln
“I think that most American people want to be law abiding, and given an opportunity to purchase marijuana in a regulated scheme, and not violate the law, that they would choose that as an option. Further if you are selling it under a regulated scheme, you have quality control and you know exactly what the substance is that is being sold and . . . at a regulated point-of-sale, that you can impose warning labels like you do for the sale of alcohol or tobacco.”
—Charles Mandigo, Former head of the FBI in Seattle
“It’s a democratic process, and nobody is forcing marijuana down anybody’s throat, and nobody is forcing beer down anybody’s throat. They can go and have a beer or martini, so I should be able to smoke a joint if I want one.”
—Cheech Marin
“I used to smoke marijuana. But I’ll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening—or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, mid-evening, and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early mid-afternoon, or perhaps the late-mid-afternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning. . . . But never at dusk.”
—Steve Martin
“I think the ‘Just say no’ mentality is so crazed. I saw a thing in a women’s magazine the other day. ‘He smokes cannabis, what am I to do? He laughs it off when I try to tell him, he says it’s not really harmful. . . .’ Of course you’re half hoping the advice will be, ‘Well, you know it’s not that harmful; if you love him, if you talk to him about it, tell him maybe he should keep it in the garden shed or something,’ you know, a reasonable point of view. But of course it was, ‘No, no, all drugs are bad. Librium’s good, Valium’s good. But cannabis, ooooh!’ I hate that unreasoned attitude.”
—Paul McCartney
“If the words ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.”
—Terence McKenna
“Marijuana is the finest anti-nausea medication known to science.”
—Peter McWilliams
“The only effect that I ever noticed from smoking marijuana was a sort of mild sedative, a release of tension when I was overworking. It never made me boisterous or quarrelsome. If anything, it calmed me and reduced my activity.”
—Robert Mitchum
“As an artist, there’s a sweet jump-starting quality to it [marijuana] for me. I’ve often felt telepathic and receptive to inexplicable messages my whole life. I can stave those off when I’m not high. When I’m high—well, they come in and there’s less of a veil, so to speak. So if ever I need some clarity . . . or a quantum leap in terms of writing something, it’s a quick way for me to get to it.”
—Alanis Morissette
“Marihuana’s relative potential for harm to the vast majority of individual users and its actual impact on society does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and firmly punish those who use it. This judgment is based on prevalent use patterns, on behavior exhibited by the vast majority of users and on our interpretations of existing medical and scientific data. This position also is consistent with the estimate by law enforcement personnel that the elimination of use is unattainable.”
—National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, 1972
“I think people need to be educated to the fact that marijuana is not a drug. Marijuana is an herb and a flower. God put it here. If He put it here and He wants it to grow, what gives the government the right to say that God is wrong?”
—Willie Nelson
“Is marijuana addictive? Yes, in the sense that most of the really pleasant things in life are worth endlessly repeating.”
—Richard Neville
“If one seeks relief from unbearable pressure, one is to eat hashish.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
“When I was a kid I inhaled [marijuana] frequently. That was the point.”
—Barack Obama
“I would absolutely never use the federal government to enforce the law against anybody using marijuana.”
—Ron Paul
“Marijuana should definitely be legalized. I think we should let everyone smoke it without fear of being thrown in jail. It’s the greatest drug in the world!”
—Michelle Phillips
“When pure and administered carefully, cannabis is one of the most useful medicines we possess.”
—Sir Russell Reynolds, Physician to Queen Victoria
“I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol. I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”
—Pat Robertson
“I like to smoke pot and work out. To the ill-informed or the uninitiated in the magical ways of the sacred plant, this can seem like a very contradictory practice. In fact though, that notion could not be further from the truth.”
—Joe Rogan
“When I first came to L.A., I got caught smoking weed on a beach in Malibu and had to go to court. It was the craziest thing ever. I was thinking, ‘We’re in Los Angeles. There are probably four hundred people getting murdered at this second, and these two cops are taking an hour to write up my court summons for smoking a joint on the beach.’ That just seemed so fucking ridiculous to me.”
—Seth Rogan
“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”
—Carl Sagan
“The lesson has already been learned with alcohol prohibition. We tried to engineer an alcohol-free society and ended up with huge criminal enterprises, government corruption, children lured into organized crime and random violence that took the lives of countless innocent people.”
—Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke
“I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had a problem with the police.”
—Keith Richards
“That is not a drug. That is a leaf.”
—Arnold Schwarzenegger
“I know you’re supposed to tell kids not to do drugs, but, kids, do it! Do weed! Don’t do the other stuff, but weed is good. . . .”
—Kevin Smith
“The War on Drugs has failed, but it’s worse than that. It is actively harming our society. Violent crime is thriving in the shadows to which the drug trade has been consigned. People who genuinely need help can’t get it. Neither can people who need medical marijuana to treat terrible diseases. We are spending billions, filling up our prisons with non-violent offenders and sacrificing our liberties.”
—Sting
“Vietnamese grass is one of the most powerful, transforming herbs in the world. When I got high on that stuff, listening to Smokey, that’s when I began to understand that life is sacred, that life has great vibrancy, which, in my case, was a perception I couldn’t get out of.”
—Oliver Stone
“For my part, I find the attempt to ban any naturally growing plant to be an attack on reality, and a denial of some of the most basic freedoms. I guess that’s why today’s GOP is so in favor of it.”
—Andrew Sullivan
“Finally, the fundamental flaw, which will ultimately destroy this prohibition as it did the last one, is that criminal sanctions cannot, and should not attempt to, prohibit personal conduct which does no harm to others.”
—Judge Robert Sweet, New York
“I’m a huge pothead, and a big fan of legalization, so I’m happy to talk about it.”
—Rob Thomas
“I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits—and millions of Americans agree with me.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
“I’m for legalizing marijuana. Why pick on those drugs? Valium is legal. You just go to a doctor and get it and overdose on it—what’s the difference? Prozac, all that stuff. So why not marijuana? Who cares? It’s something that grows out of the ground—why not? Go smoke a head of cabbage. I don’t care what you smoke.”
—Howard Stern
“Estimates of Mexican cartel profits from marijuana sales to the U.S. vary from $2 billion to $20 billion annually. And recent studies suggest that the Colorado and Washington pot laws could dent cartel profits by up to 30% given the probable emergence of cheaper, U.S.-produced marijuana.”
—Time
“Tylenol is legal, but if you take thirteen of those motherfuckers it’ll be your last headache. As long as you live you ain’t never heard of a motherfucker overdose on marijuana. You might think he’s dead; he ain’t dead! He’s gonna wake up in thirty minutes hungry enough to eat up everything in your house. That’s the side effects: happy, hungry and sleepy.”
—Katt Williams
“Everything is better when you’re high.”
—Wiz Khalifa
“Estimates suggest that from twenty to fifty million Americans routinely, albeit illegally, smoke marijuana without the benefit of direct medical supervision. Yet, despite this long history of use and the extraordinarily high numbers of social smokers, there are simply no credible reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a single death. By contrast, aspirin, a commonly used, over-the-counter medicine, causes hundreds of deaths each year.”
—DEA Judge Francis L. Young
“One of the many things I’ve learned about weed is that not only does it make you feel good, and spark creativity from time to time, but it’s also one of those things that bring people together no matter what culture, ethnicity, or social class.”
—B Real
