Legal Highs for Corporations, Handcuffs for Everyone Else: Why Drug Prohibition Has to Die

Let’s stop pretending the “war on drugs” is about health, safety, or morality. It’s about control. It’s about power. And it’s about who’s allowed to profit from altering consciousness — and who gets a SWAT team at 5 a.m. for doing the same thing.

In one corner: pharmaceutical giants pushing addictive opioids, alcohol companies sponsoring sports, and politicians cashing checks from both. In the other: regular people criminalized for using, growing, or sharing plants and substances that humans have used for centuries. The idea that this is about “protecting society” is a bad joke that’s gone on long too long.

Drug prohibition is not just a failed policy. It’s a machinery of social control, mass incarceration, and corporate protectionism. If we care about human rights, bodily autonomy, and public health, we don’t “reform” prohibition. We bury it.

The War on Drugs Was Never About Drugs

The war on drugs is often sold as a well-intentioned but clumsy attempt to keep people safe. That’s historically illiterate. The architects said the quiet part out loud decades ago.

In 1994, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, allegedly spelled it out very clearly: the administration couldn’t criminalize being Black or being against the Vietnam War, so they criminalized the groups they wanted to target by proxy — through drugs. Whether every quote detail is exact or not, the pattern is unmistakable: law enforcement and sentencing have always fallen hardest on the politically inconvenient and socially marginalized.

Consider the crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing regime in the United States. For decades, federal law imposed a 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack (cheaper, associated with Black communities) and powder (more common among wealthier, whiter users). Five grams of crack triggered the same mandatory minimum sentence as 500 grams of powder. Totally different penalties for the same drug, same molecule, same risks — just different users.

This wasn’t about chemistry. It was about who was easy to lock up and politically safe to demonize. That’s not “health policy.” That’s weaponized criminal law.

Corporate Drug Dealers in Suits, Everyone Else in Cages

Let’s put the hypocrisy under a spotlight:

• Alcohol: one of the most harmful drugs on several scientific scales, legal and aggressively marketed. The World Health Organization attributes around 3 million deaths a year to harmful use of alcohol worldwide.
• Tobacco: still kills more than 8 million people a year globally. Legal. Profitable. Immensely protected for decades.
• Opioids: Purdue Pharma and friends fueled an overdose crisis with misleading marketing, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Executives? Fines, settlements, reputational slap — but no mass-perp walk of the people who engineered the crisis.

Meanwhile, someone growing a few cannabis plants for personal use in a prohibitionist state can still lose their job, their housing, or custody of their kids. People are serving long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, while the boardrooms that pushed OxyContin get to negotiate their way out of existential consequences.

Drug policy is not about which substances are “too dangerous” to tolerate. It’s about who gets a business license and who gets a criminal record for interacting with those substances. We literally watch governments:

• Tax and license alcohol — a known carcinogen and dependence-forming psychoactive.
• Ban psychedelics that show potential in treating depression, addiction, and trauma.
• Allow corporations to dispense high-dose opioids like candy for years, then criminalize people who turn to heroin or fentanyl when the prescription faucet suddenly shuts off.

If this was about harm, the legal-illegal divide would look utterly different than it does now. Instead, it maps neatly onto corporate lobbying power and historical prejudice.

Prohibition Kills. Regulation Saves Lives.

Let’s be blunt: people are always going to use drugs. They always have. Every culture throughout history has used psychoactives — for pleasure, spirituality, pain relief, curiosity, or just to cope with an unbearable reality. Banning drugs doesn’t stop use; it just makes everything more dangerous.

The clearest example is today’s overdose crisis, especially in North America. Fentanyl and its analogues are everywhere. Why? Not because people begged for ultra-potent clandestine opioids, but because illicit markets respond to prohibition with higher potency and lower volume — the same way alcohol prohibition pushed the market from beer to moonshine.

In the U.S., more than 100,000 people a year are dying from overdoses, a large proportion involving fentanyl. But it’s not fentanyl in a regulated, labeled, controlled context — it’s mystery powder in an unregulated market where:

• No one knows the actual dose.
• Buyers can’t verify contents.
• Adulterants are common because there’s no quality control, no product standards, and no consumer protections.

In Europe, where some countries have taken more rational approaches, outcomes are better. Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001. They didn’t turn into some dystopian stoner wasteland. Instead:

• Drug-related HIV infections dropped dramatically.
• Overdose deaths remained among the lowest in Europe.
• Problematic use is treated like a health issue, not a criminal identity.

Not because Portugal is perfect, but because criminal records and fear don’t magically cure addiction — they just make people avoid help and use in riskier ways.

“But We Have to Protect People!” – From What, Exactly?

The favorite prohibitionist line is: “We have to protect people from harmful drugs.” Let’s test that logic against actual policy:

• If the goal is protection, why are sterile syringe programs and safe consumption sites still politically radioactive in many places, despite mountains of evidence that they reduce HIV, hepatitis C, and overdose deaths without increasing drug use?
• If the goal is health, why are drug checking services (allowing people to test substances for adulterants like fentanyl or PMA) still blocked or harassed in many jurisdictions?
• If the goal is safety, why is it easier to buy contaminated street drugs from an unregulated dealer than to access a supervised, prescribed supply — even for people already dependent?

Prohibition isn’t about protection. It’s about punishment and control. Harm reduction — providing tools and information so people can use more safely — actually protects people. Decriminalization and regulation actually reduce harm. But they also reduce the excuse to police, control, and lock up people who don’t fit the state’s preferred mold.

Prohibition Targets the Vulnerable, Not the Dangerous

Walk through any finance district on a Friday night and you’ll see “respectable” professionals doing all the same things people in poorer neighborhoods get arrested for: drinking to oblivion, popping pills, using cocaine. The difference isn’t the behavior. The difference is who the system is willing to treat as disposable.

Let’s connect a few dots:

• In the United States, around 1 in 5 people incarcerated are there for a drug offense, many for possession or low-level sales.
• Black and Brown communities are policed more heavily, searched more often, and charged more aggressively for the same behaviors their white counterparts engage in with relative impunity.
• Criminal records for drug offenses torpedo access to jobs, housing, and education, making it harder for people to exit precarious situations.

Prohibition is not a neutral policy that “accidentally” affects marginalized communities a bit more. It’s a tool that structurally reinforces inequality. It provides legal cover to stop, search, raid, and surveil people under the pretext of “drug enforcement,” and then quietly feeds bodies into the prison-industrial complex.

If a policy systematically hits the same groups hardest decade after decade, at some point we have to stop calling it a bug and admit it’s a feature.

We Already Regulate Drugs – Just Badly and Hypocritically

Ending prohibition doesn’t mean chaos. It means honest regulation instead of moral theater.

We already regulate psychoactive substances — licenses, age limits, quality standards, taxation. We just pretend that the arbitrary category “illegal drugs” is some metaphysical line between good and evil rather than a patchwork of historical panic, racism, and corporate lobbying.

A rational framework would treat all drugs under one principle: informed adults have the right to alter their own consciousness, and the state’s job is to minimize harm, not micromanage pleasure or punish altered states.

That looks like:

• Decriminalization of possession and personal use — no one should be caged for what they put in their own body.
• Legal, regulated supply — dose labeling, purity standards, consumer information, age controls.
• Accessible treatment and support for people who want to change their use, without stigma or coercion.
• Real harm reduction infrastructure: safe consumption sites, drug checking, naloxone, heroin-assisted treatment, supervised stimulant or opioid programs where needed.

We already know this works. Switzerland’s heroin-assisted treatment programs radically reduced overdose deaths, HIV transmission, and street dealing among participants. Portugal’s decriminalization didn’t unleash a wave of chaos. Canada’s supervised injection sites have prevented thousands of overdoses with no increase in local crime rates despite what pearl-clutching politicians predicted.

The only thing “radical” here is breaking up with a century-old moral panic that has failed on its own terms.

Bodily Autonomy Means All the Way, Not Just When It’s Politically Convenient

We talk a lot about “bodily autonomy” in other contexts — reproductive rights, gender-affirming care, medical consent. But drug policy is where many governments quietly drop the principle.

If you own your body, you own what goes into it. That includes substances some people don’t like, don’t understand, or personally disapprove of.

The state doesn’t get to declare certain forms of intoxication “morally acceptable” (beer at a barbecue, champagne at a wedding) and others criminal (a joint, a tab, a line) without admitting what it’s really doing: enforcing cultural norms through violence. Because that’s what criminalization ultimately is — the threat of force.

An adult choosing to take MDMA at a festival, LSD in the woods, or heroin in a safe site is not automatically a public health crisis. The crisis is created by forcing that person into a black market with no standards, no recourse, and a constant risk of arrest or contamination.

A serious commitment to bodily autonomy means defending the right of informed adults to use drugs — not just the drugs that are profitable for certain industries, but all of them, under transparent, evidence-based regulation.

The “Think of the Children” Distraction

Politicians love to drag out children as a human shield whenever their arguments are weak. “We can’t legalize X, what about the kids?” Here’s the inconvenient fact: prohibition doesn’t protect youth. It just hands the youth market to unregulated dealers.

Ask a teenager whether it’s easier to get alcohol or cannabis in a prohibitionist environment. Very often, the answer is “weed is easier,” because alcohol sellers can lose their license for selling to minors, whereas an unlicensed dealer answers only to their profit motive and sometimes to their supplier’s gun.

It’s the same pattern seen after cannabis regulation in several jurisdictions: youth use does not spike uncontrollably. In some places it stabilizes or even drops slightly, because the market shifts away from uncontrolled street supply into age-regulated stores where being caught selling to minors actually has consequences.

If we genuinely care about young people, we:

• Invest in honest drug education — not the laughable “just say no” scare campaigns.
• Create regulated adult markets that make underage access harder, not easier.
• Support families and communities, not rip them apart with incarceration.

“Protect the children” is used as an emotional cudgel to maintain an adult system that demonstrably fails everyone, including those kids when they grow up.

Ending Prohibition Is Not Utopian. Keeping It Is.

The fantasy is not that we could have a world with regulated, legal drugs. We already do — alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, pharmaceuticals, energy drinks that might as well be liquid anxiety. We manage risks. We set age limits. We label. We tax. Imperfect, but real.

The real fantasy is the idea that you can outlaw drugs and make them disappear. That if you just punish hard enough, shame loudly enough, and surveil intimately enough, you’ll scare people off altering their consciousness. After more than a century of this experiment, the scoreboard is obvious:

• Drugs are everywhere.
• Deaths are everywhere.
• Prisons are full.
• And yet the supply has never been more potent or more dangerous.

We don’t accept this level of failure in any other area of policy. Imagine a transport policy that killed thousands more people than it saved, year after year, and used that failure to justify more funding and more crackdowns while refusing any evidence-based alternatives. That’s drug prohibition.

The choice in front of us isn’t “drugs or no drugs.” It’s what kind of world those drugs exist in: one of secrecy, violence, contamination, and punishment, or one of transparency, regulation, and support.

Where We Go From Here

Ending prohibition doesn’t mean flicking a single policy switch. It means systematically dismantling a worldview that treats drug use as a moral crime instead of a normal part of human behavior that sometimes — not always — creates problems.

Some starting points:

• Immediate decriminalization of personal possession and use for all drugs, coupled with record expungement for past nonviolent offenses.
• Rolling out legal, regulated supply models tailored to different substances: pharmacy-style for some, licensed shops for others, supervised programs for higher-risk drugs.
• Flooding the zone with harm reduction: naloxone everywhere, safe consumption spaces, drug checking as normal as checking food ingredients.
• Redirecting law enforcement budgets from punishing users to addressing actual violence, fraud, and exploitation.
• Publicly acknowledging the historic harms of the war on drugs and compensating communities decimated by decades of targeted enforcement.

This isn’t perfect, but perfection is a stall tactic. The status quo is not neutral — it kills people every single day.

The Bottom Line: Your Body, Your Mind, Your Call

At the core of all this is a very simple principle: adults own their own bodies. Not the state, not corporations, not moral crusaders. You have the right to change your consciousness, to take risks, to experiment, and yes, to make mistakes — without the government turning your life into collateral damage.

Prohibition is a 20th-century relic built on racism, propaganda, and corporate privilege. It survives by pretending to protect us from ourselves while doing almost nothing to protect us from tainted drugs, predatory markets, or the real social drivers of problematic use: poverty, trauma, isolation, despair.

If we’re serious about freedom, serious about public health, and serious about justice, then the conclusion writes itself: drug prohibition has to go. Not cosmetically rebranded, not gently tweaked — dismantled and replaced with a system that treats people as adults, not criminals-in-waiting.

The war on drugs isn’t keeping us safe. It’s keeping us controlled. And it’s long past time we called it what it is — and ended it.

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Tags: drug policy, harm reduction, legalization, antiprohibit, opinion