Legal Highs for Corporations, Prison Time for People: Why Drug Prohibition Has to Die

We live in a world where a CEO can hook millions on a patented opioid and retire comfortably, but a 22‑year‑old with a few tabs of LSD can lose their job, their freedom, and their future. That’s not “public health.” That’s a protection racket with better branding.

The drug war is not failing. It’s succeeding at what it was built to do: control, criminalize, and discipline certain populations, while keeping psychoactive markets profitable for the right people. The problem isn’t that people use drugs. The problem is who’s allowed to profit from them, and who gets a SWAT team instead of a sales award.

The War on Drugs Was Never About Safety

Politicians love to dress prohibition up in public health language, but the historical record is brutally clear: the war on drugs has always been a political weapon.

In the 1970s, Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman spelled it out. He later admitted that the administration linked Black people to heroin and anti-war leftists to cannabis so they could raid their homes, break up their organizations, and justify it all on TV. That was never about “protecting the kids.” It was about criminalizing dissent and race under the cover of “law and order.”

Fast-forward to now, and the same architecture is still in place, just with better PR and more funding. Harsh sentencing, paramilitary policing, and criminal records that follow people for life are all framed as “prevention.” Translation: state violence as behavior management.

Meanwhile, alcohol—which causes orders of magnitude more harm than many banned substances—remains fully legal and commercially celebrated. You can drink yourself into liver failure with billboard sponsorships and sports logos cheering you on. But if you microdose LSD for depression, or use MDMA to process trauma without official permission, you’re the criminal. Make it make sense.

Prohibition Creates the Very Harms It Pretends to Fight

If prohibition worked on its own terms, we’d at least have an intellectually honest debate. But it doesn’t. It never has. What it does reliably produce is violence, contaminated drugs, and mass criminalization.

Example 1: Overdose Deaths Are a Policy Choice

Overdose crises are treated like natural disasters—unavoidable tragedies that “just happen.” They aren’t. They’re engineered by policy.

• In the U.S. alone, over 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2022. The majority of those deaths involved street opioids contaminated with fentanyl or similar synthetics.
• Fentanyl didn’t dominate the market because people begged for stronger mystery dope. It dominated because prohibition incentivizes the most potent, compact, smuggle-able substances. When you criminalize supply, you get riskier, stronger, harder-to-dose products. You get Russian roulette in powder form.

Portugal showed everyone what happens when you flip the script. In 2001, they decriminalized possession of all drugs for personal use and invested in health services instead of cops and cages. They didn’t create a libertine dystopia. They got:

• Massive reductions in HIV transmission among people who inject drugs.
• Declines in overdose deaths compared to prohibitionist neighbors.
• No apocalyptic surge in use that prohibitionists promised would happen.

Same humans, same substances. Different policy. Very different outcomes. Overdose isn’t some mystical curse attached to “drugs.” It’s a foreseeable result of forcing people into an unregulated, adulterated supply.

Example 2: Mass Incarceration for “Crimes” Without Victims

In the U.S., nearly 1 in 5 people in prison are there for a drug offense. Globally, drug offenses remain one of the leading drivers of incarceration. Not violence. Not theft. Just possession, sale, and production of politically disfavored molecules.

And it’s not applied evenly. In the U.S., Black people use cannabis at roughly the same rates as white people, yet for decades, Black users were nearly four times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession. Now that cannabis is being legalized, who’s cashing in?

• Multi-state corporate dispensary chains, venture capital darlings, and ex-politicians on company boards.
• Meanwhile, people with old cannabis convictions are still barred from jobs, housing, and in some places, voting—if they’re even out of prison.

The message from the state is obvious: the issue was never about weed itself. It was about who’s allowed to sell it, who gets punished for touching it, and who’s permanently branded dangerous for doing the same thing companies now run ad campaigns about.

Corporate Highs: When Drugs Become Respectable

Prohibitionists love to moralize about “dangerous illegal drugs,” while their donors in Big Pharma, Big Alcohol, and the emerging psychedelic industry quietly monetize the exact same neurochemistry—as long as it’s wrapped in patents, white coats, and billable codes.

The Opioid Crisis: Legal Cartels, State-Approved

While regular people got raided for tiny amounts of street opioids, companies like Purdue Pharma legally flooded communities with OxyContin, falsely marketing it as “less addictive.” Doctors were courted, regulators looked the other way, and the result was catastrophic:

• Hundreds of thousands of opioid-related deaths over two decades in the U.S. alone.
• Entire small towns hollowed out by medically initiated dependence.

When the lawsuits finally came, the Sackler family—Purdue’s owners—negotiated deals to protect a big chunk of their wealth. No perp walks. No DEA raids kicking in doors at sunrise. That’s not a bug; that’s the system functioning exactly as designed: criminalization for the poor, compliance training for the rich.

“Good” Psychedelics vs. “Bad” Psychedelics

Another perfect example: psychedelics. Decades of prohibition drove MDMA, LSD, and psilocybin underground, along with any honest conversation about their risks and benefits. Instead of nuanced education and regulated access, we got scare campaigns and felony charges.

Now that clinical research is fashionable again and there’s serious money on the table, the narrative has changed—not to “we were wrong to criminalize this,” but to “we must tightly control access through medical and corporate gatekeepers.”

Translation: You may one day be allowed to have a supervised psilocybin session for $3,000 in a licensed clinic, but growing your own mushrooms at home could still be a crime. The molecule doesn’t change. Only who profits from it does.

Prohibition Is a War on Autonomy

At the core, drug prohibition is a declaration by the state that your body and brain are not fully yours. You’re allowed certain socially acceptable ways to alter your consciousness—alcohol, caffeine, prescription meds—so long as they fit the economic and cultural script. Step outside those scripted options, and suddenly you’re a problem to be managed.

This is about power, not purity. If the real goal were “reducing harm,” we’d see:

• Honest, non-hysterical drug education starting in school.
• Legal, regulated supply to eliminate contamination and wildly inconsistent potency.
• Decriminalization of personal use, so people can seek help without fearing arrest.
• Universal access to non-judgmental harm reduction services: drug checking, supervised consumption sites, free naloxone, clean supplies.

Instead, we see governments clinging to policies that have failed on every metric except one: keeping control over who gets punished, who gets policed, and who gets enriched.

What an Adult, Evidence-Based Drug Policy Actually Looks Like

We can do better than prohibition. We already know how.

1. Decriminalize Possession and Use—Completely

No fines. No fake “diversion” programs that drag people deeper into the criminal system. Adults using drugs—of any kind—should not be a crime. Period. If someone’s use causes real harm (like driving under the influence), deal with the harm, not the molecule in their bloodstream.

2. Legalize and Regulate Supply

This is the hard part politically, but it’s the only honest way out. Every illegal drug currently on the street is already a de facto legalized product—just regulated by cartels and corner dealers instead of quality control standards.

Bring supply into the open, and you can:

• Set standards for purity and dosage.
• Label products accurately so people know what they’re taking.
• Tax sales and divert those funds to healthcare, housing, and harm reduction.
• Destroy a huge chunk of the illicit market’s power.

Countries are edging in this direction. Canada legalized cannabis. Switzerland and other countries have long used prescribed heroin programs that drastically cut overdose deaths and crime. These aren’t fantasies. They’re proof-of-concept demonstrations that our current model is a political choice, not an inevitability.

3. Fund Harm Reduction Like We Fund Policing

Governments find endless money for cops, border security, and new prisons. But when someone proposes supervised consumption sites, drug checking services, or free naloxone, suddenly the budget is “tight” and they need a 10‑year impact study and three pilot phases.

Let’s be blunt: supervised consumption sites have prevented thousands of deaths worldwide. Naloxone distribution has brought people back from the brink again and again. Needle and syringe programs slash HIV and hepatitis transmission. The evidence is black-and-white. Continuing to underfund this infrastructure while pouring money into law enforcement is a choice to let people die for political optics.

4. Erase Criminal Records and Release Drug War Prisoners

Legalizing yesterday’s contraband while leaving people locked up for it is not reform; it’s looting. Any move away from prohibition must include:

• Automatic expungement of drug possession and low-level supply convictions.
• Release of people whose only serious charges are non-violent drug offenses.
• Compensation and priority support—housing, employment, healthcare—for those whose lives were gutted by policies we now admit were misguided.

If we’re going to talk about “turning the page,” the people most harmed by the drug war need to hold the pen.

Answering the Usual Prohibitionist Panic Lines

“If We Legalize, Everyone Will Start Using Hard Drugs”

Reality check: alcohol is legal, yet not everyone is blackout drunk 24/7. Tobacco is legal, yet use has declined where regulation and education are strong. Drug availability isn’t the only—or even the main—driver of problematic use. Poverty, trauma, isolation, and lack of meaningful options are.

Where policies have shifted from punishment to health, we haven’t seen the doomsday “everyone will be on heroin” scenario. We’ve seen something much scarier to prohibitionists: people surviving.

“But Drugs Are Dangerous”

So is childbirth. So is surgery. So is driving. “Dangerous” doesn’t justify blanket criminalization. It justifies honest risk education, safety measures, and intelligent regulation.

Heroin from a known, regulated source, with clear dosing information and access to sterile equipment, is vastly safer than a random powder from an unaccountable dealer cut with who-knows-what. MDMA tested for purity in a supervised environment with chill spaces and hydration is safer than mystery pills in a hyper-policed, underground rave.

The question is not “Are drugs risky?” The question is “How much additional risk are we forcing onto people through prohibition?”

This Is About Who Gets to Control Consciousness

At the bottom of all this is a simple, subversive idea: adults own themselves. Your brain is not a government concession. Your inner life is not a regulated industry.

People will always seek altered states—for pain relief, for pleasure, for curiosity, for spiritual exploration, for escape. You can either accept that reality and build policies that minimize harm and maximize freedom, or you can wage an unwinnable war that mainly succeeds at filling prisons, protecting corporate monopolies, and giving police a pretext to search, seize, and surveil.

Ending prohibition is not about celebrating every substance or ignoring real risks. It’s about refusing a system that punishes people for managing their own minds, while rewarding institutions that do the same thing at scale with shareholder approval.

We don’t need a slightly kinder war on drugs. We need to end the war, full stop—and replace it with something adults deserve: honesty, autonomy, and policies that treat our lives as more important than someone else’s profit margin or political campaign.

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