Drugs Quotes

In my neighborhood - West 121st Street in New York, "white Harlem" - there were only two drugs: smack and marijuana. By the time I was 13, some friends and I were using marijuana fairly regularly. The Reefer Madness myth was still very strong then, but I'd been into jazz and those lyrics included so many casual references to pot that it was completely demystified for me.

Sometimes, after I'd gone at the coke like one of those snow plows moving up First Avenue, I'd think my heart was over on the dresser, pounding, and I was watching it. I asked some of the doctors who drifted through the intensive-care unit what kind of effect total cocaine abuse has on the heart and they said things like, "Well, there's not enough valid information...." That kind of answer.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

On the other hand, pot opens windows and doors that you may not be able to get through any other way.

The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension. We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time.

As for drugs - well, Gates was certainly not unusual there. Marijuana was the pharmaceutical of choice.

Sex, drugs, and insanity have always worked for me, but I wouldn't recommend them for everyone.

Never do coke with an intern ... they may not be 21

The first line (of I Am The Walrus) was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko.

If somebody gives me a joint, I might smoke it, but I don't go after it.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that's making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

I was a stonehead for 30 years. I'd wake up in the morning and if I couldn't decide whether I wanted a joint or not, I'd smoke a joint to figure it out. And I stayed high all day long.

In truth I never really liked any of the heavy drugs, because normally my energy is up when I'm performing, and that's about it. Cocaine is nothing new. It's the pressure, I think. People use it to relieve that, and for me it is about getting numb and forgetting. I have a reverse metabolic reaction to the stuff.

The drug dealers, they sympathize with me. They see me as some sort of pathetic character.

There is nothing worse than a man in the throws of an ether bender.

You took too much man, too much, too much.

In Hamburg the waiters always had Preludin - and various other pills, but I remember Preludin because it was such a big trip - and they were all taking these pills to keep themselves awake, to work these incredible hours in this all-night place. And so the waiters, when they'd see the musicians falling over with tiredness or with drink, they'd give you the pill. You'd take the pill, you'd be talking, you'd sober up, you could work almost endlessly - until the pill wore off, then you'd have to have another.

Early in my career I was divided because I had the real self underneath: the lawbreaker, the anarchist, the person who swims against the tide, the outsider, the loner, all of that guy. He was my private self, and I had this other side that wanted to be liked in order to do all those things I dreamed of as a little boy. I didn't realize that those things didn't go together until later. And I'm quite sure that my use of acid and peyote helped me accept what was really going on inside of me instead of what I had imposed on myself.

Because of acid, I now know that butter is way better than margarine.

There are an awful lot of things in the cut of street drugs that eventually make you sick. I reached a point where the skin around the edges of my fingernails used to hurt all the time. And it would peel away easily. Now, that must have been from some poison in the cut.

Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with with your self-esteem. They're no good at all.

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.

I don't think drugs are a problem; I think they're a symptom. As long as Americans are empty, spiritually, emotionally, morally empty, they will need things like the drugs they choose to use. Mankind has wanted to change the way it felt from the beginning anyway. In this country there are even more reasons to want to feel different, to want to feel better, because this is such a neon sewer. This is such a degrading culture. It forces you to play Beethoven to your child in the uterus so that he will get into a better school and a better job and make more money so he can take care of you.

I had to take a physical to do this show. They had a lot of weird questions like, "Have you ever tried sugar or PCP?"

The worst drugs are as bad as anybody's told you. It's just a dumb trip, which I can't condemn people if they get into it, because one gets into it for one's own personal, social, emotional reasons. It's something to be avoided if one can help it.

Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach

Every great general and warrior from the beginning of time was high.

I'd say pot has been a break-even proposition for me.

The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era--but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.

Reality is just a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

The way this country deals with drugs is just not funny. What a waste of everyone's time and effort. What a waste of a lot of people's lives.

Drugs have been in the game for a long time. They were there when I was in college, and even in high school. It's in life. It's in business. It's everywhere.

The effect of the coke on our relationship [with my wife Brenda] was very sick. Now that it's over, those were actually funny times. Looking for each other's coke, hiding it, finding it, doing some, not telling the other. Then fighting over it.

I slipped myself some pink Xannies/And danced around the house in all-over print panties.

To my surprise, my marijuana use has been tapering off steadily.

When we were on acid, we would go into the woods, because there was less chance that you would run into an authority figure. But we ran into a bear. My friend Duane was there, raising his right hand, swearing to help prevent forest fires. He told me, "Mitchell, Smokey is way more intense in person!"

Going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we'd turned out to be a Trojan horse. The 'Fab Four' moved right to the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that's when they started dropping us.

Herb is the healing of a nation, alcohol is the destruction.

Drugs didn't work out too well for me.

It's amazing how low you go to get high.

It was the typical paranoid experience [to hide coke]. As soon as I knew my hiding place, I thought the whole world knew it. I'd write clues to my hiding places in code, then forget the code and spend the rest of the day looking for my coke.

There's this thing called freebasing. It's not free, it costs you your home. It should be called 'homebasing'.

The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs.

Cocaine was different. It kept saying, "You haven't had enough." I became an abuser almost instantly.

I may have smoked too much weed, but I wasn't taking drugs or anything.

When I was a kid, I inhaled. Frequently. That was the point.

I'd go on runs [on cocaine ], four and five days without sleep. Then I'd crash and sleep about 18 hours a day for seven to ten days. Then it would take a few more weeks to get over a vague sort of depression. Then I'd be off on another run.

All the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes people just want to feel different. And so long as Third World peasants are poor they will send us drugs, and as long as we are empty we will ask for this little plant.

For an entertainer, part of the thing you do is just style. And the coke did help me get into great runs of pure form.

The ending of my experience with cocaine came in a periodic way. I would get high less frequently, I would use smaller amounts, and I would do coke for less periods of time. And that process just kept increasing and increasing until I wasn't using it at all. I didn't go on a program anywhere. I didn't join an organization or detox anywhere. I just slowly tapered off until it was gone. That was also true of my heavy pot use. I just tapered off until there was almost no use at all. And the same thing was true of drinking tons of beer.

Two things happened. The creative side of my career was harmed. When I'd sit down and write under the influence of coke, the ratio of pages kept to pages thrown out declined drastically. But onstage, when rapping about a feeling I already owned, I would sometimes get a burst of eloquence.

Don't let them fool you with dope and cocaine, can't do you know harm to feel your own pain.

When I listen to those tapes now, the real cocaine shows; there's just nothing special about their content.

When people asked me, "Do you get high to go onstage?" I could never understand the question. I mean, I'd been high since eight that morning. Going onstage had nothing to do with it.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.

"Drugs" are not necessarily narcotics. The narcotic is one type of drug and coffee is a drug... booze is a drug... many drugs.... They're all around us.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

right' i said. 'but first, we need the car. and after that, the cocaine. and then the tape recorder, for special music, and some acapulco shirts.

The secretiveness. The stealth. Those were obviously the aspects of cocaine use I was addicted to.

We were talking briefly about cocaine... yeah. Anything that makes you paranoid and impotent, give me more of that!