Thomas Szasz Quotes About Drugs

Quotes about: Drugs

• Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.

  Thomas Szasz

  Children, Giving, Drug

  Thomas Szasz's remarks at the 35th Anniversary and Human Rights Award Dinner of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International at Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, www.szasz.com. February 28, 2004.

• I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body.

  Thomas Szasz

  Father, Men, Ideas

• Why do children want to grow up? Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity. But what is there today, in America, that very poor and very rich adolescents want to do but cannot do? Not much: they can do drugs, have sex, make babies, and get money (from their parents, crime, or the State). For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty. Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?

  Thomas Szasz

  Inspirational, Baby, Sex

• All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.

  Thomas Szasz

  Humor, Intelligent, America

• If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes.

  Thomas Szasz

  Gynecology, Addiction, Drug

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (2003). “Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers”, p.11, Syracuse University Press

• The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, "Jewish problem" was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; "drug-abuse problem" is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.

  Thomas Szasz

  Names, People, Giving

  "The second sin". Book by Thomas Szasz, 1973.

• The disease concept of homosexuality as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. ... Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics.

  Thomas Szasz

  Suicide, Addiction, Drug

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.168, Syracuse University Press

• After generations of living under medical tutelage, which provides us with protection (albeit illusory) against "dangerous drugs", we have failed to cultivate the self-reliance and self-discipline we must possess as competent adults surrounded by the fruits of our pharmacological-technological age.

  Thomas Szasz

  Self, Discipline, Drug

  Thomas Szasz (1996). “Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market”, p.24, Syracuse University Press

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