Life & Wisdom Quote by Wayne Kramer

“Drugs” gets demoted here from villain to evidence. Wayne Kramer’s line works because it refuses the tidy morality play that culture loves: the addict as cautionary tale, the substance as the singular corrupting force. By calling drugs “a symptom,” Kramer points the finger at whatever hurts came first - alienation, boredom, trauma, untreated mental illness, poverty, the dead-end feeling of a society that sells freedom while rationing dignity. The dash does heavy lifting, too: it’s a pause that mimics an intervention-style correction, the speaker interrupting a familiar narrative to reframe it.

The subtext is also an indictment of how institutions like simple causes. “War on drugs” rhetoric thrives on the fantasy that you can erase social dysfunction by criminalizing a chemical. Kramer’s phrasing punctures that fantasy. If drugs aren’t “the cause of anything,” then punishment can’t be the solution; it’s at best theater, at worst a way to avoid funding care, housing, and humane treatment. The line reads like hard-earned clarity rather than abstract theory - the kind you arrive at after watching people relapse not because they’re weak, but because their lives remain unlivable.

Context matters: Kramer, long associated with countercultural currents that collided with addiction and incarceration, speaks from the seam where personal damage meets political failure. The quote is a refusal to romanticize drugs, but also a refusal to scapegoat them. It insists the real story is upstream.