Political Quotes

“this approach, the approach in the bill, as it came out of committee, and the approach that the House took, is throwing good money after bad by this society. The question is not whether it is a good thing for people to be taking drugs. It is not. The question is whether we are better going to deal with that problem by the current situation in which we take an overwhelmingly penal approach to people who use drugs. The most amount of money we spend, the most activity we do right now, is to catch people who use drugs and put them in prison. That is the direction this amendment goes in. I think that is disastrously mistaken, and I oppose it here as part of an effort to substitute for this enormous expenditure of money on locking up for very, very long periods of time people who are simply users, because I say to my colleagues, If you simply use and have enough will infer you're going to distribute, and, if you use and share, then you're a distributor under this law. Mr. Chairman, I want to redirect these resources into education programs which can work with people who are young enough and into treatment. We should not kid ourselves. We are in a mood where people talk about cutting the Federal budget, where they talk about voting for less and less. We are not going to simultaneously substantially increase expenditures from prison and also increase to the extent we should funds for drug treatment.”