In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen … - Theodore Dalrymple

Same topic Authors

Quote of the day

By the grey woods, by the swamp, where the toad and newt encamp, by the dismal tarns and pools, where dwell the Gouls. By each spot the most unholy, by each nook most melancholy, there the traveller meets, aghast, sheeted memories of the Past. Shrouded forms that start and sigh, as they pass the wanderer by. White-robed forms of friends long given; In agony, to the Earth - and Heaven.

Theodore Dalrymple

In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen - have said that "the war on drugs is lost. " But to demand a yes or no answer to the question "Is the war against drugs being won?" is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.

Policemen, Stopped, Stupid, War, Wife, Won

Same Author Quotes

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

Beautiful, Character, Mention, Thinking, Though, Written

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.

Begins, Enslaved, Human, Ideas, Law, Men

Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.

Biographies, Biography, Life, Life Is, Patterns, Pleasurable

Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

Benign, Habit, Ingrained, Obeying, Order

Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.

Age, Drunkenness, Gambling, Garden, Loss, Said