Jim Ramstad Quotes

Prohibition of substances which give pleasure to people does not work. Addiction is a health problem, not a moral one, and there are many proven strategies which can reduce its burden.

All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care.

Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.

The war on meth must be fought with a multi-pronged approach.

We have lost the War on Drugs. We cannot arrest our way out of it….It’s a public health problem, not a crime problem.

I think that addiction is a very, very important thing that has to be treated, but has to be treated as a health problem and not as a police problem.

I've lost over 800 West Virginians the last year. Lost their lives to opiate and drug addiction. This is something that we've got to fight. We need to have treatment centers that take care of people. We need to start basically education from kindergarten all the way through adulthood. We need to get involved and stop this epidemic that's going on that's just ravaging.

The establishment of a National Methamphetamine Prevention Week will significantly increase awareness of meth and educate the public on effective ways to help prevent its use.

About one third of the people who are on the streets are mentally ill.

The addict is under compulsion not capable of management without outside help.... If addicts can be punished for their addiction, then the insane can also be punished for their insanity. Each has a disease and each must be treated as a sick person.

To become a narcotic addict is an anti-social act and the foundation of countermeasures against addiction is to treat and rehabilitate addicts.

Drunkenness was attacked in the same manner; it was discountenanced on every occasion by those who had charge of any department: its destructive and pernicious effects were frequently stated by his own more prudent comrades, at the proper moment when the individual was soberly suffering from the effects of his previous excess; pot- and public-houses were gradually removed from the immediate vicinity of their dwellings; the health and comfort of temperance were made familiar to them; by degrees drunkenness disappeared, and many who were habitual bacchanalians are now conspicuous for undeviating sobriety.

I regret I feel this passion, but they [alcoholics & drug addicts] have been relegated to dying in the street forever, and I want to get them out. I need your help to do it. I am angry, it is obvious. I am angry that the Department says they have everything they need, when everything in the country indicates it isn't being done. So, I will continue to be angry. I hope it will be a friendly anger as we try to work out these problems that we have between us.

Addiction is a neurological disease—a disease of the brain…. No one wakes up in the morning and says today ‘I want to become an addict.’

The consumption of drugs could be legalized, not penalized.

The war on drugs is a war on our own families …. We have to move from a system that punishes to a system that treats.

Working together with Democrats and Republicans, I passed legislation to help break the grip of addiction. By investing in prevention, treatment, and recovery, empowering law enforcement, and stopping the overprescribing of painkillers, we can turn the tide.

The criminal justice system is not the right place - or it shouldn't be the place of first resort to provide addiction or mental health services. It should happen elsewhere with no police and no judges and no juries and no jails.

On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It's devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.

This is the worst drug epidemic I've seen in my lifetime.

My father just got out of the Betty Ford Clinic. He's in his 60s, and this was the first time he ever did anything like that.

Drug addiction is an incredibly difficult challenge to manage on one's own. When I think of all the stories I've heard from people, the common denominator is that they all were ultimately able to find somebody who was willing to support them. Maybe it was someone they knew, like a parent or a sibling or a friend; other times it was a treatment center with a compassionate staff who didn't give up on them. That made all the difference.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

The opposite of addiction is human connection. And I think that has massive implications for the war on drugs. The treatment of drug addicts almost everywhere in the world is much closer to Tent City than it is to anything in Portugal. Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It's actually going to deepen it.

Drug addiction is tearing our communities and our country apart, and until we decide we're going to think differently about it, until we decide that we're going to invest as a country in prevention and treatment, until we decide that as individuals we're going to step up and do our part to address this epidemic, we're not going to solve this.