End the Farce: Why Drug Prohibition Has to Die Before More People Do

The war on drugs is not a policy failure. It is a policy success for exactly the people it was designed to benefit: politicians, police unions, prison contractors, and corporations that profit from criminalized substances staying illegal or tightly controlled. It’s doing what it was built to do—control, punish, and extract—while hiding behind the language of “public health” and “safety.”

If we were honestly trying to reduce harm, save lives, and respect adults’ autonomy, most of our current drug laws would be unthinkable. Instead, we cling to prohibition like a state religion—even as people die from contaminated supply, overdose, and police violence, while legal industries quietly sell their own, safer-branded addictions.

It’s time to say it plainly: prohibition is the problem. Not “drugs,” not “addicts,” not “bad choices.” The system itself is engineered for harm.

The Deadliest Ingredient Is Prohibition, Not the Drug

Drugs don’t magically become more dangerous when someone decides to ingest them. They become more dangerous when the state forces that consumption underground. When something is criminalized, you don’t eliminate it—you eliminate quality control, transparency, and accountability.

Look at the opioid crisis. Politicians love to point fingers at “fentanyl” and “cartels” as if these are meteorites falling from the sky. But fentanyl didn’t appear out of nowhere: it was the predictable result of prohibition economics. Crackdowns on prescription opioids and heroin pushed the market toward more potent, compact, profitable substances. Surprise: supply adapted. It always does.

In 2022, over 109,000 people in the United States died from drug overdoses, with synthetic opioids like fentanyl involved in the majority of those deaths. But this statistic is deceptively framed. Most of these deaths were not caused by some inherent evil in “drugs.” They were caused by an unregulated, contaminated, and unpredictable supply created by prohibition. People don’t overdose on a known, labeled, consistent dose of pharmaceutical-grade substances under safe conditions nearly as easily as they do on mystery powder bought in an alley or through a text dealer.

We know this because other countries have run the experiment the US and many others refuse to try.

Portugal Proved the Obvious: Criminalization Does Not Protect People

Portugal decriminalized the personal possession of all drugs in 2001. Not “legalized” in the commercial sense, but removed criminal penalties for users and shifted focus to health and support. Prohibitionists promised chaos, addiction, and streets full of the undead.

What happened instead?

• Drug-related deaths in Portugal are now among the lowest in Europe.
• HIV infections among people who inject drugs plummeted—new HIV diagnoses related to injecting fell from over 1,000 a year in the early 2000s to a few dozen per year.
• Problematic use stabilized or declined; people were more willing to seek help when they weren’t staring down a criminal record.

This isn’t some utopian outlier. When you stop treating people as criminals for what they put into their own bodies, they are more likely to stay alive, more likely to seek care, and less likely to be dragged into the revolving door of “justice” that solves nothing.

Meanwhile, countries that double down on criminalization keep reporting the same outcomes: rising overdose deaths, entrenched black markets, mass incarceration, and staggering racial disparities.

The War on Drugs Is a War on People (Some People More Than Others)

The “war” in the war on drugs has never been neutral. It has never been about all drugs or all users. It’s been precise: punish poor and marginalized users while protecting wealthy industries and politically connected suppliers.

In the United States, Black people are about 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than white people, despite using at roughly similar rates. This isn’t an accident—it’s the direct continuation of a system designed to target specific communities under the guise of “law and order.” The Nixon administration openly admitted it: criminalize drugs associated with enemies, then use law enforcement as a political bludgeon.

And yet, as of 2024:

• People are still sitting in prison for selling or possessing cannabis in states that now have glossy dispensaries, corporate brands, and cannabis IPOs.
• Some incarcerated people have decades-long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, while executives from companies like Purdue Pharma walk away with fortunes, “settlements,” and no prison time.

This isn’t “law.” It’s selective punishment dressed up as morality.

Corporate Drugs: Legal If They Pay, Deadly If They Don’t

The hypocrisy is so loud it’s almost boring at this point.

Alcohol is legal, heavily marketed, and responsible for millions of deaths globally each year via liver disease, accidents, cancers, and violence. The World Health Organization has stated plainly that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption in terms of long-term health. Yet we let corporations plaster cities with ads, sponsor sports, and build entire “lifestyles” around drinking.

Tobacco—still causing over 8 million deaths per year worldwide—remains legal. Sure, advertising is slightly reined in in some countries, but the substance is still sold everywhere from gas stations to corner shops, perfectly normalized.

Opioid manufacturers like Purdue Pharma aggressively pushed OxyContin, downplaying its addictive risks, funneling it into communities, and igniting what became a public health catastrophe. The result? A few settlements, some corporate restructuring, and the Sackler family’s name quietly peeled off museum walls. No one in handcuffs.

But sell a few grams of heroin to support your own habit, and you can absolutely end up in a cage for years. Get caught with a personal-use amount of MDMA at a rave, and you might lose your job, your housing, your future. Hand out free, tested drugs and sterile syringes with the goal of preventing overdoses and infections? In many places, you’re flirting with criminal charges.

In other words: if your drug is profitable for the right people and taxed for the state, congratulations—it’s “regulated.” If your drug challenges existing markets or power structures, it’s a crime, and you’re the villain.

Prohibition Destroys Health While Pretending to Protect It

Politicians love to say “we criminalize drugs to protect people’s health.” The data laughs in their faces.

Here’s what prohibition actually delivers:

• Overdose deaths from unpredictable potency and contamination.
• Spread of HIV, hepatitis C, and other infections when sterile supplies are restricted or criminalized.
• Delayed or avoided medical care because people fear arrest, stigma, or losing their children if they admit to using.
• Criminal records that hammer employment, housing, education, and family stability.
• Police violence and harassment, especially against people who use drugs in public spaces because they have nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile, harm reduction services—needle exchanges, supervised consumption sites, drug checking, heroin-assisted treatment, and safe supply programs—actually lower deaths, reduce disease, and connect people with support. Where they’re allowed to operate, the results are not ambiguous.

Example: supervised injection sites in cities like Vancouver and in parts of Europe have shown consistent outcomes—no increase in neighborhood crime, massive reduction in fatal overdoses in the immediate area, and more people connecting to health and social services. Yet in many jurisdictions, these life-saving tools are blocked because they “send the wrong message.”

Apparently the “right message” is: use alone, in the dark, with no help, and hope your dealer didn’t mix in something that kills you instantly.

The “Gateway Drug” Is Criminalization Itself

The myth that “soft” drugs like cannabis serve as a gateway to “harder” drugs has been debunked repeatedly, yet it still gets dragged out as a talking point whenever reform is on the table. What actually serves as a gateway is being forcibly pushed into illegal markets and criminal networks.

When all drugs are lumped together under prohibition, users are funneled into the same black market where heroin, meth, counterfeit pills, and fentanyl circulate. There’s no age checks, no warning labels, no dosage information. Someone looking for a bit of MDMA or a benzodiazepine may easily be sold a fentanyl-laced pill. That’s not a chemical gateway—it’s a regulatory vacuum.

Portugal’s experience again dismantles the gateway fantasy: when you remove criminal penalties and treat drugs as a health and social issue, you do not see an explosion in “graduation” to harder substances. You see stabilization, less chaos, and more connection to services.

Police, Prisons, and the Business of Criminalization

Drug prohibition props up massive state and private interests. Without criminalized drugs, a huge chunk of policing, border security, and incarceration loses its favorite excuse for budgets and toys.

In the United States, nearly 1 in 5 people in prison is locked up for a drug offense. In some states, drug possession is one of the single largest drivers of arrests. Police justify militarized SWAT teams, no-knock raids, and surveillance tech on the back of “drug enforcement.”

Every time a SWAT team bursts into the wrong house during a drug raid, every time someone is killed over suspected possession, we’re told it’s the tragic cost of keeping communities “safe.” Safe from what—powder?

Private prison companies, drug testing corporations, and manufacturers of law enforcement equipment all feast on this manufactured crisis. Their profits depend on constant criminalization. Your bodily autonomy is their business model.

What Real Reform Looks Like (And What It Doesn’t)

Token gestures are not enough. Decriminalizing cannabis while leaving everything else in the shadows is not enough. Letting corporations sell weed while keeping small-scale legacy growers and past defendants locked out—or locked up—is not justice.

Real reform means:

• Full decriminalization of drug use and possession for adults. No criminal records for what you put in your body. Period.
• Legal, regulated supply for currently illegal drugs—starting with safe supply for opioids to cut the overdose carnage driven by fentanyl contamination.
• Expungement of past convictions for nonviolent drug offenses and immediate release of people serving time for what is now legal or decriminalized.
• Massive reinvestment in harm reduction, housing, mental health, and social support, not more cops, jails, or drug courts dressed up as “treatment.”
• Community-led regulation rather than handing entire markets to a few corporations to recreate Big Tobacco and Big Booze in new outfits.

What real reform doesn’t look like is substituting one form of coercion for another. Forcing people into treatment under threat of jail is not “health-based” policy—it’s just punishment with a medical costume. Adults have the right to refuse treatment. Bodily autonomy doesn’t disappear because you use a substance some politician dislikes.

“But What About People Who Get Addicted?”

This question is always thrown out as if prohibition has been some grand success at preventing addiction. It hasn’t. It has simply made addiction more dangerous and more stigmatized.

Addiction is a complex interaction of biology, psychology, trauma, social conditions, and yes, drug exposure. You don’t fix trauma, poverty, and alienation with handcuffs. You don’t cure pain with prison.

Under a sane drug policy, someone who develops a problematic relationship with a substance could:

• Access honest, nonjudgmental information about safer use and risks.
• Use in supervised environments if they choose high-risk routes like injection.
• Access pharmacological supports—like prescribed opioids instead of street supply, or substitution therapies—without humiliating hoops and moral lectures.
• Seek help without the fear of losing their job, kids, or housing just for admitting they use.

People will always seek ways to alter consciousness, manage pain, or cope with reality—through alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, antidepressants, benzos, psychedelics, opioids, stimulants, you name it. A rational society doesn’t pretend it can police that impulse out of existence; it focuses on making sure those choices are as safe, informed, and supported as possible.

The Real “Moral Hazard” Is Blind Obedience to Bad Laws

Prohibitionists love to moralize about “sending the wrong message” if we decriminalize or legalize. But let’s talk about the message current policy sends:

• It tells people that the government would rather they die from poisoned drugs than admit its own policies created that situation.
• It tells industries that as long as they wear suits and pay lobbyists, they can sell addictive products with minimal criminal risk.
• It tells marginalized communities that their bodies are battlegrounds where the state can invade at will.

Obeying laws that are fundamentally unjust isn’t “responsible citizenship.” It’s complicity. We do not owe deference to a framework that criminalizes survival strategies, medical self-management, or simply the human desire to feel different for a while.

The real moral failure is clinging to prohibition long after the evidence has burned it to the ground.

End Prohibition Before It Ends More of Us

We have more than enough data, history, and lived experience to know that the war on drugs is a war on people—and a profitable, politically convenient one at that. It has not reduced drug use. It has not made drugs disappear. It has not protected communities. It has expanded police powers, swelled prison populations, and turned preventable deaths into a permanent background statistic.

If we actually want fewer overdoses, less violence, and healthier communities, we need to dismantle prohibition, not “reform” it around the edges while keeping its core intact. That means trusting adults with their own bodies, building systems that keep people alive instead of punishing them, and dragging drug policy out of the moral panic era into the reality-based one.

Drugs are not going away. The only question is whether we keep letting politicians and corporations manage them through cages and profit, or we finally insist on a system rooted in autonomy, evidence, and harm reduction.

Prohibition has had a century-long trial run. The verdict is in. It’s guilty.

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