40 Drug Quotes

In a world where words wield immense power, quotes often resonate deeply, capturing complex emotions and ideas with stunning brevity. In this curated collection, we've gathered the top 40 drug quotes that reflect a spectrum of experiences and perceptions—offering insights that range from cautionary tales to moments of profound clarity. Whether you seek to understand the impact of drugs on society or find solace in the shared human experience, these quotes provide valuable perspectives that could be both eye-opening and thought-provoking. Join us as we explore these poignant words, each holding a mirror to different facets of the human condition.

1. “Federal and state laws (should) be changed to no longer make it a crime to possess marijuana for private use.” - Richard Nixon

2. “The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.” - William F. Buckley

3. “Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.” - Philip Dick

4. “We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.” - Hunter S. Thompson

5. “I'm not drunk, just a little stoned.” - Gerard Way

6. “Sylvie wishes the anti-depressants had been around when she was in her early twenties, not only to rescue her from the dark tunnels that came when her brother first got sick, but also to keep her from fucking all those assholes.” - Francesca Lia Block

7. “My love", she whispered, so low she sounded to Jacques as if she were speaking from the bottom of an abyss, "now we shall belong to each other in a strange country that you do not know. It is the country of madmen but not the country of brutes. I am taking away your vulgar senses and giving you others more refined.” - Rachilde

8. “To demand that a person pee in a cup whenever you wish him to, without a documented reason to suspect that he has been using an illegal drug, is intolerable in our republic. You are saying to him, "I wonder if you are not behaving in a way that I approve of. Convince me that you indeed are.Outrageous.Intolerable.” - Alexander Shulgin

9. “LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.” - Timothy Leary

10. “Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.” - William S. Burroughs

11. “Drugs are a bet with your mind.” - Jim Morrison

12. “Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it.” - Nikki Sixx

13. “I told her that I didn't want to take any drugs. That I had come here not to take drugs. "Listen," she said, not unkindly, "up until now I would say that ninety-nine percent of all the narcotics you have taken in your life you bought from guys you didn't know, in bathrooms or on street corners, something like that. Correct?"I nodded."Well these guys could have been selling you salt or strychnine. They didn't care. They wanted your money. I don't care about your money, and, unlike your previous suppliers, I went to college to study just the right drugs to give to people like you in order to help you get better. So, bearing all that in mind ... Take the fucking drugs!"I took the drugs.” - Craig Ferguson

14. “Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.” - Salvador Dali

15. “How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection..” - Hunter S. Thompson

16. “You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.” - Chuck Palahniuk

17. “I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.” - Cormac McCarthy

18. “Drugs don't really fix anything, except for everything.” - Ashly Lorenzana

19. “Drugs suck more than anything else I have ever liked so much.” - Ashly Lorenzana

20. “I'm not crying out for help, but I am sharing my experience in the hopes that readers will get something out of it. I'm not the one who gets to decide what that is, if anything. I'm just starting the "journey" if you will, so I can't possibly know yet what the "message" of my life really is. I only know what has happened so far, and how I've felt up until this moment. I agree that reading about the pain of others is concerning when they are still hurting and in the same situation as when they wrote about it. But what can you do? You can reach out, ask how you can help and be there to listen. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. You can't love someone who doesn't love themselves enough to take care of themselves and stay out of bad situations. Believe me, I know this.” - Ashly Lorenzana

21. “While looking at a website for liposuction, I learned that it was a six-to eight-week recovery period, the clincher being that, during that time, I would under no circumstances be able to use street drugs. Obviously I had to think of a more realistic approach.” - Chelsea Handler

22. “When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.” - Bob Marley

23. “I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason.” - Michael Cunningham

24. “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!" - Cassio (Act II, Scene iii)” - William Shakespeare

25. “In the field I’m in, there is a lot of that and it gets offered to me all the time. People even go as far as to just stick it in your pocket and walk off. Now, if it was a good thing, they wouldn’t do that. I mean, would somebody drop something beautiful in my pocket and just walk off? But I don’t want to have anything to do with any of that. I mean, as corny as it sounds, but this is how I really believe: Natural highs are the greatest highs in the world. Who wants to take something and just sit around for the rest of the day after you take it (drugs), and don’t know who you are, what you’re doing, where you are? Take in something that’s gonna inspire you to do greater things in the world.” - Michael Jackson

26. “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

27. “A lot of people who find out about the things I do immediately figure I'm just a pathetic "druggie" with nothing to say that is worth hearing. They talk endless bull shit of "recovery!" They make it sound like some amazing discovery...don't they know I'm far too busy trying to recover me?” - Ashly Lorenzana

28. “The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.” - Stephen King

29. “...introduced Doc to the miracle of morphine. From that very first shot it was as if he'd discovered the one vital ingredient that God had left out when He'd sent Doc kicking and screaming into the cold, cruel world.” - Steve Earle

30. “If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.” - Bill Hicks

31. “I think you're crazy good at this survival stuff, Cary."His shoulders sag. He gives me a small, relieved smile and we start walking again, his step a little lighter than it was before. It feels strange to have that kind of power over someone."I mean, you're crazy good at it for a stoner who couldn't seem to get his shit together academically at all," I add.” - Courtney Summers

32. “Over the years, Skye sampled every drug she could find, and like many addicts, had a working knowledge of pharmacology. She snorted coke and swallowed pills. She took downers—orange and red Seconal, red and ivory Dalmane, Miltown, Librium, Luminal, Nembutal, and Quaaludes. Blue devils, red birds, purple hearts. Enough of them sank her in a kind of coma, where she watched her own limbs suspended in front of her in syrup. For a party, there was Benzedrine, rushing in her veins and making her talk for an hour in one long sentence. Day to day, she carried yellow tablets loose in her pockets, Dilaudid and Percodan, and chewed them in the back of classrooms. But her favorite was the greatest pain reliever of them all, named for the German word for hero.” - Frederick Weisel

33. “Drug addicts are so funny that way. Just spinning around, lost in their own little world. Doing so much, accomplishing so little. How sad.” - James St. James

34. “If you skip one class, everyone knows about it. The teacher will track you down, or one of the guidance counselors will track you down and ask if you're smoking pot. According to the geniuses running this place, the only reason you would skip class is if you're smoking pot, though I actually find my classes more enjoyable when I'm high.” - Flynn Meaney

35. “Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they’re willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff.” - Terence McKenna

36. “She once told me of a night that fumed with escapes and was filled with bedsides reeking of ecstasy; she told me the stars cast not judgments, but blessings, knowing full well the disastrous outcomes of the deeds they cradled with the strings of their young hearts. She’d inhaled the night itself, those around her doing the same, and so all become one. No disharmony. No discordance. Nothing to shatter the cause; nothing to unearth the beauty. So as we together ascended that front porch, allowing the glow behind the blown-out windows and the odious steams plunder us from through the cracks...time forgot to distill us, and our steps became as silver as glass. I could no longer deny the boiling words of my blood: tonight would be the beginning of a very long road indeed.” - Dave Matthes

37. “As I sit today, I am a genuine, often pleasant person. I am able to imitate a human being for long spurts of time, do solid work for a reputable organization, and have, over the breadth of time, proven to be an attentive father and husband. So how to reconcile my past with my current circumstances? Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?” - David Carr

38. “Much of the mystery surrounding drug action can be cleared up by recognizing that drugs affect only the rate at which biologic functions proceed; they do not change the basic nature of existing processes or create new functions.” - Robert Berkow

39. “Criminologists have documented that the amount of coverage a crime victim receives affects how much attention police devote to the case and the willingness of prosecutors to accept plea bargains.” - Barry Glassner

40. “Evans turned away, did something with his left eyelid for the benefit of the other two. "It's got him," he smirked. "He's tuned-in from now on."Time started to slow up and act crazy. Minutes took much longer to pass than they had before. It was hard for him to adjust himself to the new ratio, he got all balled-up. When it seemed like half an hour had gone by, the radio would still be playing only the first chorus of the same selection that had begun a good thirty minutes before. Otherwise, nothing much happened. Vinnie was doing a good deal of muffled giggling over there on the divan. The stranger who had been sitting reading the paper got up, yawned, stretched ponderously, and strolled out into the hall, with a muttered "Happy landing!" by way of leave-taking. He didn't come back again any more.Turner looked down one time and a quarter of an inch of charred paper was all that was left between his fingers. Then the next time he looked there was a full length cigarette again.” - Cornell Woolrich