Drug Enforcement Administration Quotes

If you call Escobar to trial, you can be sure that all the members of your family tree—ancestors and offspring—will be eliminated. We are capable of executing you anywhere on this planet. There is no place you can hide.

Our government has the weirdest bias against cannabis [Marijuana]. There's no reason for everybody to be so afraid of it. It's not the antichrist the DEA makes it out to be. Industrial hemp is a very useful plant. I challenged the attorney general to get rid of the criminal stigma associated with hemp so we can look at it in terms of how it might be useful. And government has no business telling us what we can and can't use for pain relief.

The war on drugs has failed in West Africa and around the world

The war on drugs has failed. Its failure has been so categorical and self-evident that the statement itself is bromidic. By any reasonable metric of success—addiction rates, violence, the availability of drugs in our schools— it’s clear that our 40-year jihad against certain plants and chemicals has done far more harm than good.

Anti-drug fanatics and cops are the criminals - it's like McCarthyism. They need someone to dislike to distract the public from the really important problems.

The idea that [Jeff Sessions] is the man who is going to end the progress on the drug war makes me want to rip my hair out, every carefully nurtured curl on my head.

Prescription drugs can be even worse than illegal drugs. The only difference is the legality.

Drug money, such as booze money during Prohibition, has corrupted countless police, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, border patrol agents, prosecutors and judges... Because illegal drugs are unregulated, their purity is unknowable -- accounting for thousands of overdose deaths and injuries... Let's stipulate that some unknown number of Americans will become addicts after legalization, who otherwise would not have. We must ask whether the terrible price we are now paying -- in police costs, international drug control efforts, border security, foregone tax revenue, overdose deaths, corruption and violence -- is worth it.

During my time at DEA, I saw how marijuana prohibition has done absolutely nothing to make Americans safer or healthier. It has only served to destroy millions of innocent lives, erode civil liberties, perpetuate a growing prison-industrial complex, and enrich and strengthen the most violent criminal organizations.

I'm a big fan of the DEA.

Front-line officials, including DEA agents, border patrol and other homeland-security professionals, should remind Mr. Trump how important Mexico's assistance is in achieving his national-security goals.

Marijuana can be a highly effective treatment for PTSD, a condition afflicting nearly one in five veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And overwhelming scientific evidence has already proven marijuana's safety and efficacy for treating conditions like chronic pain, which affects many combat-injured veterans... Veterans in states without medical marijuana laws fare far worse. These veterans risk arrest for using marijuana to treat their combat injuries, joining the more than 800,000 Americans arrested annually for marijuana offenses... They deserve to receive medical advice from their VA doctors, not the DEA.”