Barry McCaffrey Quotations

If you want to fight a war on drugs, sit down at your own kitchen table and talk to your own children.

Colombia is in a risky position. They've got a peace process that's going nowhere, and a drug production problem that's skyrocketing.

So at the end of the day, our number 1 goal, our top priority, is to motivate American youngsters to reject the abuse of illegal drugs, tobacco and alcohol. All three of them are illegal behaviors.

Thank God we're going to try to continue and effectively defend our frontiers with the Border Patrol, with the Customs Department, with the Coast Guard, with the Armed Forces.

What happened? The Country got sick of it and said, Enough is enough. And all over the Country we saw springing up community organizations determined to do something about this terrible menace of drugs.

I'm a professor of national security studies, and I know a lot more about fighting than Rumsfeld does.

The United States and Mexico are trapped - economically, culturally, politically and because of drug crime - in the same continent.

I'm always concerned a bit about creative hypocrisy, because it's $49 billion of U.S. money on drugs that is acting as an engine drawing 60 percent of our own cocaine, marijuana, heroin coming through Mexico or adjoining Pacific or Caribbean waters.

We've got to talk to parents who are taking their young people to an all-night rave and seeing police uniforms and believing that because it's quoted as alcohol-free that this is a safe environment. Their young people are at risk in that environment.

Other treatments have been deemed safer and more effective than a psychoactive burning carcinogen self-induced through one's throat,

At the end of the day...if your army won't fight, it's because they don't trust their incompetent, corrupt generals, they don't trust each other. This is an enduring civil war between the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds. So I don't think we've got any options and we'd be ill-advised to start bombing where we really can't sort out the combatants or understand where the civilian population is.

When I get a very generous introduction like that I explain that I'm emotionally moved, but on the other hand I'm Irish and the Irish are very emotionally moved. My mother is Irish and she cries during beer commercials.

Extremely disappointed that corruption may have reached such a level in Mexico.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

We've got a national campaign by drug legalizers, in my view, to try and use medicinal uses of drugs and legalization of hemp as a stalking horse to get in under the radar screen.

We say in a democracy that good ideas will drive out bad ones, so if the good ones aren't there, we're left with the bad ones

Experience is valuable only if it's imbued with meaning from which one can draw salient conclusions. Otherwise, experience becomes imprisoning.

The 1998 study shows that we have turned the tide of youth drug use.

Will I prosecute? Go talk to the Attorney General and the U.S. Attorneys and the law enforcement officials, because on a case by case basis they will uphold the law.

We came out of it with a firm commitment to continue to uphold federal law, to capture data on what starts to go wrong because of these two propositions, and we are going to attempt to educate other state authorities on what actually happened.

We are now seeing a clear trend, ... Teen drug use is down significantly and rapidly for two straight years.

We have made the drug criminals afraid. We will now make them disappear, ... and this is only beginning of it.

We have 1.8 million Americans behind bars today at Local, State and Federal level. In the federal system, which has doubled in the last ten years, over 110,000 people behind bars in the Federal system, probably two-thirds are there for drug related reason.

There has to be strict compliance with safety concerns,

Through substance abuse treatment we address a profound crisis in America, reducing the associated crime, stop the stress on our health system and the drain on tax revenues by restoring productivity, and return chronic addicts to sobriety.

be killed suddenly, in significant numbers and without warning.

everyone understands that a team effort is needed to confront the drug crisis.

(Drug smuggling) has gotten immeasurably worse in the last year, and we are determined to play hardball with international drug criminals.

Eradication is the central aspect of U.S. counter-narcotics thinking....That can't be taken off the table.

As a result, the campaign takes a long-term view on working with filmmakers and understands that we may not see concrete results for several years.

Young people may think that they are only experimenting, but, as this study shows, they are really gambling with their futures,

This money is aimed at helping those nations' economies, judicial systems, police and armed forces, in hopes of re-establishing the rule of law,

There's been a real reluctance to engage with a problem that affects a lot of American families and a lot of communities.

As powerful as television is, some experts believe that movies have an even stronger impact on young people.

It's a national issue now. It's not just a California or an Arizona issue. We know that these proponents of drug legalization are promoting it in other states, too.

The heart and soul of the national effort ought to be prevention, education and treatment, ... In the last five years, we've increased our prevention budget by 52 percent, our treatment budget has gone up by a third. ... We are putting our money where our mouth is.

The medical, scientific process is open to any drug. That includes marijuana. But you have to get through a process and demonstrate scientific validity. And in this case, to be honest, I think it's nonsense. This is mostly a 'Cheech and Chong' show for the quasi-legalization of marijuana.