Legal Weed, Illegal People: How Governments Turn Freedom Into a Subscription Service

Governments love to say “drugs are dangerous.” What they mean is: your drugs are dangerous. Theirs are just “regulated markets,” “pharmaceutical innovation,” and “tax revenue opportunities.”

The war on drugs was never about safety. It’s about control, profit, and who’s allowed to get high — and who gets a criminal record for doing it. We’ve reached the point where the same governments that spent decades terrorizing people over a plant are now selling that plant back to us with a tax stamp and a PR campaign… while people are still sitting in prison for doing the exact same thing.

This isn’t policy. It’s cartel behavior with better branding.

The War on Drugs: A War on People, Not Substances

The rhetoric is always the same: “We have to protect communities from drugs.” Yet communities are not being destroyed by molecules — they’re being destroyed by raids, mandatory minimums, and criminal records that lock people out of jobs, housing, and education.

Take the United States. According to the ACLU, between 2001 and 2010 there were over 8 million marijuana arrests, 88% of them just for possession. That’s millions of people branded as criminals for having a plant that is now sold in slick boutiques with venture capital backing. And the racial skew is obscene: Black people are around 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than white people, despite similar usage rates.

Meanwhile, the DEA and local police agencies have hoovered up billions in federal funding and asset forfeiture, all justified under “drug enforcement.” Translation: we’ll take your cash, your car, and sometimes your house — even if you’re never convicted of a crime — because we suspect it’s drug-related. That’s not public health. That’s state-backed looting with extra paperwork.

The substances are not the core problem. Prohibition is.

Legal For Corporations, Criminal For You

Let’s talk hypocrisy, because prohibition runs on it.

On one side: ordinary people getting arrested, fined, caged, and surveilled for using substances on their own time, with their own bodies.

On the other side: corporations and institutions making billions off the exact same human desire to alter consciousness — just with better lobbyists.

Example #1: The Opioid Crisis vs. Street Fentanyl

When Purdue Pharma and friends flooded the US with OxyContin, they did it with regulatory approval, glossy marketing, and paid-off medical opinion leaders. Doctors were told addiction risks were “less than 1%.” Patients were turned into customers, then into “drug seekers,” then into statistics.

The result: a massive wave of opioid dependence and overdose. When tighter prescribing finally came, people didn’t magically become “drug-free.” They shifted to the illicit market — heroin, then fentanyl. The pharmaceutical industry helped create a landscape of demand and tolerance, and prohibition supplied the contaminated, unstable street drugs that are now killing tens of thousands per year.

And what happens? Executives pay fines (without admitting wrongdoing), companies restructure, shareholders regroup, and the bodies keep piling up. Nobody from Purdue is doing a 20-year mandatory minimum. But the guy on the corner with a few grams of dope? He’s the one “destroying communities.”

This is not about chemistry. This is about who holds the patent versus who holds the bag.

Example #2: Cannabis Legalization Without Justice

In Canada, cannabis has been legal nationwide since 2018. In dozens of US states, medical or adult-use cannabis is legal. Politicians now brag about their cannabis reforms like they weren’t cheering on SWAT raids a decade ago.

But legalization has been laser-focused on tax revenue and tightly controlled corporate markets — not justice. In many places:

• People still sit in prison for cannabis offenses that would now be legal.
• Prior cannabis convictions block people from entering the legal market.
• Big money, not people most harmed by prohibition, dominates licensing.

In Illinois, where cannabis was legalized in 2019, early data showed that more than two-thirds of dispensary licenses ended up connected to existing corporate players, despite promises of “social equity.” In other words: same prohibition, different winners.

When the state goes from “zero tolerance” to “bring your credit card,” but leaves criminal records intact and communities over-policed, that’s not reform. That’s a hostile takeover of a culture they spent decades trying to crush.

Prohibition Is the Engine of Harm

Drug-related harm doesn’t miraculously vanish with prohibition — it mutates. You don’t get safe, regulated abstinence. You get a black market with:

• Unknown potency (one pill might be mild, the next might kill you).
• Adulterants (fentanyl, xylazine, random research chems, whatever is cheap and available).
• No quality control and no way for users to reliably know what they’re taking.
• Violence created by turf wars and prohibition economics, not by substances themselves.

Think about alcohol. During US alcohol prohibition, people went blind from methanol-contaminated booze, died from bathtub gin, and empowered violent criminal organizations. The solution was not “stronger prohibition.” It was: end prohibition, regulate production, and let adults drink in peace.

We’ve learned this lesson already — then forgot it the second the word “drugs” stopped meaning “alcohol.”

“But If We Legalize, Everyone Will Use!”

This is the scarecrow argument prohibitionists drag out every time. It’s also empirically weak.

• Portugal decriminalized personal possession of all drugs in 2001. They didn’t open “heroin theme parks.” They shifted from criminal punishment to health-based responses. Overdose deaths and HIV transmission plunged, and Portugal still has lower drug use rates than many EU countries with harsher laws.
• In US states that legalized cannabis, teen use did not explode on command. Studies are mixed, but many show flat or even decreased youth use, especially when regulated markets displace dealers who don’t check ID.

Adults have always used psychoactive substances. They use caffeine every morning, alcohol after work, benzodiazepines from their doctor, nicotine on breaks, and increasingly, prescription stimulants to push through productivity culture. Society doesn’t fall apart because people use drugs. It falls apart when the state weaponizes punishment instead of offering information, services, and autonomy.

What prohibitionists are really terrified of isn’t “more drug use.” It’s more honest conversation about why people use substances in the first place — to feel better, to cope, to explore, to connect, to escape systems that grind them down.

Harm Reduction: What Actual Care Looks Like

Harm reduction treats people as human beings with agency, not as problems to be managed or criminals to be warehoused. It starts from reality: people are going to use drugs. The question is whether we make that as safe and informed as possible, or as dangerous, stigmatized, and chaotic as possible.

Real harm reduction means:

• Needle and syringe programs to prevent HIV and hepatitis C.
• Drug checking and reagent testing so people can see what’s actually in their substances.
• Legal supervised consumption sites where people can use under medical supervision, with naloxone on hand, instead of dying alone in a bathroom or alley.
• Low-threshold access to substitution therapies (methadone, buprenorphine, slow-release morphine, even heroin-assisted treatment) without a maze of shame-based hoops.
• Non-judgmental education about dosing, combinations, and safer use practices.

These interventions are relentlessly attacked by prohibitionists as “enabling.” Meanwhile, overdoses continue, prisons are full, and kids grow up in households traumatized by surveillance and raids — not “enabled” by a naloxone kit.

When someone says harm reduction “sends the wrong message,” what they mean is: it undermines the fear-based propaganda that keeps prohibition politically useful.

Decriminalization Is Not Enough

Decriminalization of personal possession is a step forward, but it’s not the finish line. It means you (sometimes) won’t be criminally charged for possessing a substance — but the production, distribution, and sale remain in the hands of the illicit market. That leaves:

• Unregulated supply (still contaminated, still variable, still dangerous).
• Ongoing violence around trafficking and territory.
• No consumer protections, no testing standards, no labeling, no accountability.

We don’t “decriminalize” cars without roads, licenses, and safety rules. We don’t “decriminalize” food and then leave it all to street vendors with no hygiene codes. Decriminalization without legal, regulated supply is like taking off the handcuffs but leaving people in a burning building.

The moral panic says “legalization” means chaos. Reality says: prohibition is the chaos. Legal regulation is the exit strategy.

What Real Drug Policy Freedom Looks Like

A sane, non-prohibitionist drug policy for adults would be grounded in three things: autonomy, transparency, and evidence.

1. Full Legal Regulation of Adult Drug Markets

Not “medical loopholes.” Not “maybe cannabis, but only if you can afford a license and we shut down home grows.” Actual legal markets for adult use, with:

• Quality control (known potency, contaminants screened out).
• Clear labeling (dose, onset time, interaction warnings).
• Diverse access models: licensed shops, cooperatives, safe supply programs for dependent users, and robust home cultivation where feasible.

If the state can figure out how to regulate alcohol, tobacco, and prescription benzodiazepines, it can figure out how to regulate MDMA, psychedelics, stimulants, and opioids. The barrier isn’t complexity. It’s cowardice and vested interests.

2. Automatic Expungement and Release

Cannabis is legal in dozens of jurisdictions, but people are still sitting in prison for cannabis offenses. That’s not just hypocritical — it’s sadistic.

Any serious reform must include:

• Automatic expungement of past low-level drug offenses.
• Immediate review and release for people incarcerated solely for non-violent drug crimes now made legal.
• Reparations and reinvestment in communities targeted by drug war policing.

If the government can build a real-time database to track every dispensary sale for tax purposes, it can build a system to wipe records and let people go home.

3. Health Services Without Policing Attached

Right now, seeking help can mean inviting surveillance. Parents risk child protective services. People who use drugs risk police involvement. Migrants risk immigration consequences. That’s not “care.” That’s coercion.

We need:

• Services that are firewalled from police and immigration databases.
• Voluntary treatment instead of court-mandated abstinence cults.
• Peer-led harm reduction where people who use drugs actually design the systems that affect them.

If your “health” system requires handcuffs to function, it’s not health. It’s just prohibition in a lab coat.

Bodily Autonomy Includes Your Brain

Anti-prohibition isn’t about claiming every drug is harmless. Nothing is harmless — including driving, alcohol, antidepressants, childbirth, or extreme sports. The real question is: who gets to decide what level of risk is acceptable for your own body and mind?

Prohibition says: the state does. A small circle of politicians and bureaucrats, influenced by lobbyists and moral panics, will decide which molecules are “medicine” and which are “felonies” — even if the pharmacology is nearly identical.

Bodily autonomy is meaningless if it stops at the bloodstream. Adults have the right to:

• Alter their consciousness.
• Take informed risks.
• Seek pleasure, insight, relief, or escape.

That doesn’t mean a free-for-all without information or support. It means you get honest education, tested substances, non-punitive services — and the final say.

Ending Prohibition Is Not Radical. Keeping It Is.

The real extremism is clinging to a century-old project that has:

• Filled prisons.
• Supercharged racial and class inequality.
• Helped fuel overdose crises and HIV epidemics.
• Handed billions to cartels and corrupt officials.
• Criminalized grief, trauma, curiosity, and pleasure.

All while failing at its supposed goal: drugs are available everywhere. If the war on drugs were a commercial product, it would’ve been recalled decades ago for catastrophic failure and lethal side effects.

Ending prohibition — fully, not just in PR-friendly slices — is not some utopian dream. It is the minimum ethical response to a policy regime that has been exposed as violent, incoherent, and rigged.

We know what works: decriminalization, legal regulation, harm reduction, and treating people as people, not as battlegrounds. Everything else is just rebranding the same old war and hoping no one notices the body count.

Adults deserve better than to have their consciousness policed by the same institutions that greenlight corporate drug pushing and then moralize about “addiction” when the profits are already banked.

End prohibition. Not in five years, not after another commission, not after another round of “pilot projects.” Now. Because the danger isn’t that people will use drugs. They always have, and they always will. The danger is leaving that reality in the hands of prohibitionists who would rather see people die than admit they were wrong.

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