"If you don't think drugs have done good things for us, then take all of your records, tapes and CD's and burn them"
About this Quote
Hicks doesn’t argue for drugs so much as he dares you to admit what you already consume. The line is a trapdoor: if you condemn drugs as pure social rot, then you’re obligated to torch the very culture you’ve built your identity around. Records, tapes, CDs: a roll call of modern cool, a domestic inventory turned into a moral audit. The command to “burn them” is deliberately puritanical, borrowing the language of censorship and moral panics, then flipping it back on the scolds. If you want a clean society, start by sterilizing your own pleasures.
The intent is less “drugs are good” than “your outrage is selective.” Hicks targets a familiar American posture: puritan ethics paired with indulgent consumption, especially when the product is art. His point lands because it links the War on Drugs to a broader impulse to control experience, imagination, and messiness. The joke is abrasive, but it’s also diagnostic: we celebrate the outputs of altered states while criminalizing the inputs, as if inspiration can be separated from the bodies and chemicals that sometimes produce it.
Context matters. Hicks is speaking from the late-80s/early-90s landscape of D.A.R.E., “Just Say No,” and televised crack hysteria, while rock, jazz, and pop history openly carried the fingerprints of intoxication. He weaponizes that contradiction with a comedian’s economy: one sentence that turns a moral crusade into a bonfire of your own record collection.
The intent is less “drugs are good” than “your outrage is selective.” Hicks targets a familiar American posture: puritan ethics paired with indulgent consumption, especially when the product is art. His point lands because it links the War on Drugs to a broader impulse to control experience, imagination, and messiness. The joke is abrasive, but it’s also diagnostic: we celebrate the outputs of altered states while criminalizing the inputs, as if inspiration can be separated from the bodies and chemicals that sometimes produce it.
Context matters. Hicks is speaking from the late-80s/early-90s landscape of D.A.R.E., “Just Say No,” and televised crack hysteria, while rock, jazz, and pop history openly carried the fingerprints of intoxication. He weaponizes that contradiction with a comedian’s economy: one sentence that turns a moral crusade into a bonfire of your own record collection.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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