Heroin didn’t become “evil” all by itself. It was made evil — on paper, in headlines, and in courtrooms — by politicians, moral crusaders, and law enforcement bureaucracies that needed a villain. The result: over 100 years of policy built on panic instead of evidence, and a global overdose crisis driven not by the drug…
“If we legalize drugs, society will collapse.” This is the prohibitionist greatest hit — played on repeat by politicians, police unions, and moral crusaders since the 20th century. They tell us legalization means more addiction, more crime, more death. They insist the only thing standing between us and chaos is handcuffs and prison bars. Meanwhile,…
Harm reduction isn’t about telling you what you “should” do with your body. It’s about facing reality: adults use drugs, prohibition makes that use far more dangerous, and people deserve tools to stay alive and as healthy as possible. The drug war has never been about safety. If it were, governments wouldn’t be pushing people…
If you tried to design a case study in how not to make drug policy, you’d probably end up telling the story of heroin. It has everything: corporate profiteering, racialized moral panic, moral crusaders, cops and carceral machinery, and—of course—decades of preventable deaths made worse by prohibition. Heroin’s history is not a story about a…
The war on drugs is not a failure. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do: control people, criminalize dissent, protect profits, and dress all of it up as “public health” and “public safety.” Calling it a failure implies good intentions gone wrong. The record is a lot uglier than that. If you’re an…
Heroin didn’t become a “demon drug” because of chemistry. It became one because of politics, racism, and a century of cowardly lawmakers who found it easier to punish people than to regulate markets or fund healthcare. If you want a case study in how prohibition wrecks civil liberties and public health, heroin is Exhibit A….
Heroin didn’t become “public enemy number one” because the molecule changed. It became a demon because politicians needed a monster, newspapers needed a headline, and moral crusaders needed a cause. The result? A century of prohibitionist nonsense that wrecked civil liberties, exploded incarceration, and made heroin more dangerous at every step. This isn’t a story…
We’ve spent over half a century and trillions of dollars trying to “fight” drugs, and what do we have to show for it? Overdoses at record highs, prisons overflowing with nonviolent offenders, cartels richer than ever, and governments pretending this is all somehow progress. This isn’t a war on drugs. It’s a war on people…
The war on drugs is not a policy failure; it’s a policy success for exactly the people it was built to serve: politicians who need a scapegoat, police departments hungry for budgets, private prisons looking for bodies, and corporations that profit off both legal and illegal markets. It is, however, an absolute catastrophe for everyone…
If you want a case study in how governments can take a useful, powerful drug and turn it into a tool of mass incarceration, stigma, and death, you don’t need to look further than heroin. This is not a story about a “bad drug corrupting society.” It’s a story about political fear-mongering, racist propaganda, economic…