"Smoking marijuana in a society which has declared marijuana illegal makes you a criminal, subject in many states and also federally to imprisonment as a felon, and everyone who smokes marijuana under the present system is (or quickly becomes) aware of the dire consequences of this innocent act. Even if you arenâ??t ever arrested, jailed, tried or imprisoned, you still live under constant fear of being busted by the ubiquitous narcotics police, you are subject to having your phone tapped, your person and possessions (starting with your home) pawed over and ripped apart by these goons and their uniformed accomplices, your privacy subject to violation by the police at any moment of the night or day. And if you do fall into the clutches of the police and their associates in the prosecutorâ??s office and judicial chambers and jails and penitentiaries, you are thrown into a world you would never have thought could exist in the kind of country youâ??d always thought America was. For the courts and the jails are the carefully-disguised cesspools of American society â?? only those who are branded as criminals ever find out how hopelessly vile and perverted these institutions are. And in the past few years thousands and thousands of young people who would otherwise have gone through their lives as my parents did, believing in the garbage and lies dished out by the â??legalâ? authorities about their wonderful justice and their noble penal institutions (they call them â??correctional facilitiesâ?), are being exposed to the grim realities of American life by virtue of their use of the killer weed marijuana."
(John Sinclair 1971)