Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgement.

Just say no, no, no, no, no ... you'll get a much better price.

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?

Pot is like a gang of Mexican bandits in your brain. They wait for thoughts to come down the road, then tie them up and thrash them.

Heroin may be bad, but it sure as hell hasn't hurt my CD collection.

Why should Ben Johnson give up his gold medal from Seoul, for example, when the Beatles remain revered for Sgt Pepper - an album that owed as much to banned substances as anything the Canadian did.

When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain.

To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage Weltscbmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution - then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

The only thing I thought might ever kill me off was clean living. I thought, How am I going to listen to that horrible noise I make without a gram of coke and a couple of double Jack Daniels?