Legal For Corporations, Illegal For You: How Drug Policy Protects Power, Not People

Drug prohibition isn’t about safety. If it were, the world’s most dangerous, addictive, and socially destructive drugs wouldn’t be sold with loyalty cards at supermarkets and pushed in glossy TV ads during the evening news. Drug policy, as it exists now, is a control system: a convenient tool for surveillance, social sorting, and keeping certain people criminal while others profit legally off the same behaviors and substances.

The War on Drugs Was Never About Drugs

Let’s start with the obvious: the “War on Drugs” has catastrophically failed its stated goals. It has not stopped drug use. It has not eliminated demand. It has not made drugs safer. What it has done is fill prisons, militarize police, destabilize entire regions, and give governments a permanent excuse to interfere in people’s private lives.

In the United States alone, over 1.1 million people are arrested for drug-related offenses every year, the vast majority for simple possession. Meanwhile, drug use rates remain remarkably stable over time. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, approximately 1 in 5 U.S. adults uses an illicit drug each year. That’s tens of millions of people. If prohibition actually worked, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

The original architects of modern drug prohibition were not subtle about their motivations. Former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman admitted decades later that the drug war was a political weapon. His words:

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin… and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

That’s not public health. That’s social engineering with a badge and a gun.

Legal If You Own a Lobbyist, Criminal If You’re Poor

The hypocrisy at the heart of drug policy is almost comically brazen. Governments claim they’re protecting people from “dangerous substances” while:

• Allowing alcohol – a leading cause of liver failure, traffic deaths, and domestic violence – to be sold on every corner.
• Letting pharmaceutical companies flood communities with opioids, generating fortunes while triggering a public health catastrophe.
• Greenlighting prescription amphetamines (hello, Adderall) for millions of people while throwing others in prison for meth.

Same molecule family, different label, different class of criminal.

Example #1: Purdue Pharma vs. Everyone Else

Take the opioid crisis. Purdue Pharma and other manufacturers knowingly pushed OxyContin and similar prescription opioids with aggressive, deceptive marketing, minimizing addiction risks. Between 1999 and 2021, an estimated over 800,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses involving opioids (prescription and illicit combined).

How many Purdue executives are serving life in prison for trafficking a dangerous, addictive substance that devastated entire towns? None.

Now contrast that with people caught with small quantities of heroin or fentanyl – often using to self-medicate the fallout of the very same opioid crisis. In many U.S. states, simple possession of modest amounts can still carry years in prison, a permanent criminal record, and exclusion from housing, education, and employment.

So when governments say they’re “cracking down on dangerous drugs,” what they mean is:

Dangerous for whom? Profits or people?

Prohibition Creates the Black Market It Pretends to Fight

Prohibition doesn’t get rid of drugs; it gets rid of regulation. It hands production and distribution to the most ruthless actors and then pretends to be shocked when things become more dangerous.

Every basic rule of harm reduction that we accept for legal substances is thrown out the window the moment a drug crosses the line into illegality:

• No quality control.
• No dosage accuracy.
• No age verification.
• No consumer information or safety labeling.

Then we blame the substance – not the conditions we created.

Example #2: Fentanyl in the Street Supply

Fentanyl is not inherently some supernatural demon molecule. In a medical setting, it’s used safely every day as a powerful analgesic and anesthetic. The problem is unregulated fentanyl in an unregulated market.

Because prohibition makes it risky and expensive to transport bulkier drugs, suppliers have every incentive to move toward more potent substances per volume – basic prohibition economics. That’s exactly what happened with illicit opioids: heroin was displaced by fentanyl, and fentanyl is now being cut into stimulants and counterfeit pills.

Result? Massive spikes in overdose deaths from people who:

• Don’t know what they’re taking.
• Can’t accurately dose.
• Don’t have ready access to drug checking, naloxone, or supervised consumption spaces.

This isn’t “drug abuse.” This is policy abuse: a direct consequence of governments choosing criminalization over regulation, and moral panic over harm reduction.

Crime by Design: How Illegality Manufactures “Criminals”

Politicians love to conflate “drug use” with “crime,” as if correlation is causation and prohibition itself wasn’t the main driver of that crime. When a substance is illegal:

• Its price skyrockets due to risk.
• People with dependency may be pushed into theft, survival sex work, or other underground economies.
• Violence escalates because disputes can’t be resolved in court or via legal contracts.

You’ve essentially engineered a perfect crime generator and then blamed the chemistry instead of the policy.

We’ve already run the experiment in reverse with alcohol. During U.S. alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, organized crime flourished. Violence surged. People went blind from toxic, poorly made alcohol. Re-legalization didn’t magically make alcohol safe, but it did:

• Eliminate much of the associated organized crime.
• Allow regulation of production and sale.
• Enable reasonable harm reduction (warning labels, drunk driving laws, age limits).

Now imagine applying the same logic – regulation instead of prohibition – to other substances. This isn’t radical; it’s consistency.

Portugal, Canada, and Others Already Broke the Spell

We’re not speculating in the dark here. Countries have already tested saner policies, and the sky failed to fall in the dramatic way prohibitionists promised.

Portugal: Decriminalization Doesn’t Mean Chaos

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the possession of all drugs for personal use. Not legalized, but decriminalized: possession became an administrative issue, not a criminal one. The result?

• Drug use did not explode. Lifetime use rates are comparable to or lower than many European countries with harsher laws.
• Overdose deaths dropped substantially. Portugal now has one of the lowest overdose death rates in Europe.
• HIV transmission among people who inject drugs plummeted thanks to harm reduction and accessible services.

Portugal still has problems – prohibitionist structures haven’t fully vanished, and supply remains mostly illegal – but the core point stands: treating drug use as a health and social issue, not a criminal one, saves lives.

Canada and Supervised Consumption Sites

In Canada, supervised consumption sites (SCS) and overdose prevention sites have repeatedly shown:

• Overdoses can be reversed on-site with no recorded deaths inside these facilities.
• Public injecting and discarded syringes in surrounding areas decrease.
• People using these services are more likely to access healthcare and treatment when they decide they want it.

Yet these life-saving services are constantly under political attack, demonized by the same people who happily allow alcohol outlets and casinos to cluster in the same neighborhoods. Because again, this isn’t really about danger; it’s about which risks are profitable and which are criminalized.

Prohibition as a Tool of Social Control

Look at who gets arrested, searched, and incarcerated for drugs. It’s not evenly distributed across society:

• In the U.S., Black people are nearly 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than white people, despite similar usage rates.
• Indigenous communities in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are massively over-represented in drug-related arrests and imprisonment.
• Poor and working-class people are policed fiercely, while wealthier users in private spaces use cocaine, MDMA, and designer drugs with near-zero legal consequences.

Drug laws function as a precision instrument: formally neutral, practically targeted.

Meanwhile, as some countries legalize or commercialize cannabis, who’s cashing in? Often the same class of investors, corporations, and political insiders who were silent – or complicit – while people (disproportionately poor and racialized) were locked up for doing the exact same thing.

If you’re going to legalize, but not automatically expunge records or free people jailed for those now-legal acts, that’s not reform – that’s piracy with a legal department.

What Real Reform Looks Like: Beyond Cosmetic Tweaks

Token reforms won’t cut it. Swapping “War on Drugs” language for “public health approach” platitudes while continuing to criminalize people and restrict access to safer supplies is just PR with extra steps. Real change requires dismantling prohibitionist logic at its core.

1. Decriminalize Personal Use and Possession – Across the Board

No adult should face criminal charges for possessing drugs for personal use. Full stop. Administrative responses (if any) should prioritize voluntary support, not coercion:

• No arrest, no jail, no criminal record.
• No forced “treatment” as punishment.
• No mandatory disclosure to employers, schools, or immigration authorities.

People don’t heal under threat; they hide.

2. Regulate Supply Instead of Outsourcing It to Cartels

A rational drug policy would move substances from the criminal market into regulated frameworks tailored to their risk profiles:

• Legal, quality-controlled access for adults.
• Transparent labeling of dose, strength, and ingredients.
• Restrictions similar to or stricter than those for alcohol and tobacco as appropriate.

Different substances, different rules – but all grounded in evidence, not moral panic.

3. Invest Heavily in Harm Reduction

Harm reduction isn’t “encouraging drug use”; it’s acknowledging reality. People use drugs. They always have and always will. Policy can either make that use safer or deadlier.

Serious harm reduction means:

• Free, widely available naloxone.
• Drug checking services (including at festivals, nightlife, and community centers).
• Supervised consumption spaces and safe supply programs.
• Syringe access, smoking supplies, and education without stigma.

You know who’s terrified of this? Not “the children” – it’s the politicians and bureaucrats whose careers are built on pretending punishment works.

4. Repair the Damage: Expungement, Release, and Redistribution

If we’re serious about justice, reform must include:

• Automatic expungement of past drug possession and low-level supply convictions.
• Release or resentencing of people imprisoned for acts that are now legal or would be under new laws.
• Direct reinvestment of tax revenue from legal markets into affected communities, not just into police budgets.

Anything less is just gentrified prohibition.

“But What About Safety?” – The Favorite Lazy Objection

When all else fails, prohibitionists fall back on a simple line: “But drugs are dangerous!” As if that’s some gotcha moment.

Many things are dangerous. Alcohol. Cars. Extreme sports. Surgery. Childbirth. All of them can kill. We don’t ban them; we manage risk. We regulate, educate, provide safety equipment, and let adults assess their own thresholds.

The honest question isn’t “Are drugs dangerous?” but:

Does prohibition reduce or increase that danger?

The evidence is overwhelmingly clear:

• Prohibition increases contamination and unpredictability.
• Prohibition drives people away from health services and toward more clandestine, risky use.
• Prohibition concentrates the harshest enforcement on the most marginalized users.

If your “safety policy” makes things deadlier and more chaotic, it’s not a safety policy. It’s ideology with a body count.

This Is About Bodily Autonomy – And Power

At the core, the drug policy debate is not about chemistry; it’s about power and control over bodily autonomy.

Do adults have the right to alter their own consciousness? To seek pleasure, relief, exploration, or escape using substances, as long as they don’t violate others’ rights? If you say no, you’re not arguing for health – you’re arguing for a government veto over what people do with their own bodies and minds.

And funny how that veto isn’t applied evenly. You’re allowed – even encouraged – to:

• Drink alcohol to unwind after work.
• Take prescription stimulants to increase productivity.
• Use sleeping pills or benzodiazepines to knock yourself out at night.

But light up the wrong plant, swallow the wrong pill without a doctor’s blessing, or seek your relief in unfashionable molecules, and suddenly you’re a criminal, a deviant, a problem to be “managed.”

Where We Go From Here

Ending prohibition isn’t some utopian fantasy; it’s the bare minimum for a grown-up society that respects evidence and adult autonomy.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: governments already know the War on Drugs doesn’t work. They’ve seen the data from Portugal, from supervised consumption spaces, from decriminalization pilots. They keep the system because it’s useful – for policing dissent, managing marginalized populations, and feeding carceral and security industries.

So change won’t come from “educating policymakers” alone; it comes from pressure, organizing, and refusal to accept the lazy moral framing that equates criminalization with care.

If we want a world with fewer overdoses, less violence, and more freedom, we have to name the real problem clearly:

The problem is not drugs. The problem is prohibition.

And the sooner we stop pretending otherwise, the sooner we can build drug policy that protects people instead of power.

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