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Orrin Hatch
U.S. Senator, Utah (Republican)

I don't think there's any law that can prevent a teenager from taking that first puff of a marijuana cigarette, that first sniff of cocaine. If I knew what it was, I would dedicate my career to passing it. But we need more education. When you have a young person who has experimented, you know how fast they can get in trouble on methamphetamine. We have to get some treatment for them. We haven't concentrated as we should on first-time offenders. They can get drugs in jails, but there's no real education in the jails, and no treatment.

Keep in mind, treatment alone won't do it. Enforcement alone won't do it. Education alone won't do it.

We have to reduce both the demand for and the supply of drugs. The movie Traffic drives home the point that law enforcement alone won't solve the problem. And a lot of people have had to face the fact that their own children have experienced drugs. First-time use of drugs has gone way up. If you look at Ecstasy alone, use by tenth- and twelfth-graders is up sharply. A huge portion of those who used heroin for the first time last year were under eighteen. Like anything else, back in the 1980s, we thought we were right. There were too many judges being too permissive. But I do think it's time to re-evaluate and look for the injustice. And where there's injustice, correct it. The sentencing laws have worked to a large degree because people aren't being treated with disparity now the way they were. So there was a need for uniform standards for judges. But we've seen some flaws and some intractability.

funniest part:

I think marijuana is a gateway drug; nobody can deny that. And I get furious when I hear people say it's harmless. This is not the same marijuana that was used in the Sixties and Seventies. Potency is way up. We know that if you stop a kid from even smoking before twenty-one, they'll probably never touch drugs. If they start on marijuana, there's a high propensity to go on to harder drugs.

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I think they should just legalize marijuana. Put it this way - they sell liquor in every corner store in the United States. And booze is much worse for you than marijuana. Much worse. Drastically worse. Orders of magnitude worse. So it doesn't make any sense - they should just legalize it.

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