I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police.

Keith Richards’ public image in the late 1960s–1970s was inseparable from repeated drug arrests and police scrutiny, including high-profile raids and prosecutions in Britain and abroad. The line is typically quoted as a wry, defiant rejoinder to the moral panic and tabloid fixation surrounding rock musicians’ drug use. In that climate, Richards often framed his troubles less as personal “drug problems” than as conflicts with law enforcement and the state’s desire to make examples of celebrities. The quip fits his broader stance: treating the subject with gallows humor while criticizing what he saw as harassment and hypocrisy in policing and media coverage.

The remark pivots on a distinction between private behavior and public punishment. Richards implies that drugs themselves were not the central source of dysfunction in his life; rather, the real “problem” was the criminal-justice response—surveillance, raids, arrests, and the reputational damage that followed. As a piece of rock-and-roll rhetoric, it also functions as self-mythologizing: the speaker casts himself as resilient and untroubled, while portraying authorities as the disruptive force. More broadly, the quote critiques the framing of addiction and drug use as purely individual moral failure, suggesting that legal and social systems can create or amplify harm.