P.J. O'Rourke On Drugs

P.J.’s insights about drugs, that is …

On crack:

“Milton Friedman believes the crack epidemic was the result of cocaine being against the law. He says crack ‘was invented because the high cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to provide a cheaper version.’ Milton Friedman is a brilliant man, a courageous defender of liberty. I respect Milton Friedman. I revere Milton Friedman. But from drugs Milton Friedman doesn’t know. Crack is less expensive than powdered cocaine – for about ten seconds. It was the marketing guys who thought up crack, not the people in accounting.”

“Smoking crack is a way for people who couldn’t afford college to study the works of Charles Darwin.”

On pot:

“Pot has become America’s alternative brewski.”

“Besides, how much can you really say against a drug that makes teenage boys drive slow?”

On drug awareness:

“The problem with illicit drugs is that nobody knows anything about them – except for those of us who found out too much, and we have memory problems.”

And on the US Department of Health’s National Household Survey of Drug Abuse, America’s official source of drug use and abuse (which gathers data by sending government employees door-to-door to ask people to volunteer information about their illegal drug habits):

“The survey takers ‘adjust for nonresponse through imputation,’ which is called, in layman’s terms, making stuff up.”