Legal For CEOs, Prison For You: The Hypocrisy At The Heart Of Drug Prohibition

Let’s stop pretending the “war on drugs” is about health, safety, or morality. It’s about control. It’s about who gets to profit from altering consciousness—and who gets caged for it.

Governments and corporations are perfectly happy to pump out addictive antidepressants, benzodiazepines, alcohol, and gambling apps, then clutch their pearls when someone microdoses LSD or smokes a joint in a park. That’s not public health; that’s cartel behavior with a flag on top.

If adults have the right to vote, enlist, sign mortgages, and drown their brains in corporate-approved booze, they have the right to choose their own drugs without being hunted by the state. Period.

The Big Lie: “We’re Protecting You”

The foundational myth of prohibition is simple: the state is criminalizing drugs to “protect” you from harm. If that were true, policy would follow evidence. It doesn’t. In fact, it aggressively runs in the opposite direction.

Let’s compare two realities:

• Alcohol causes roughly 3 million deaths globally per year, according to the WHO. It’s directly linked to liver disease, cancers, traffic deaths, and domestic violence.
• Cannabis has no recorded lethal overdose in human history, and yet people are still jailed for it in many countries.

If harm were the metric, alcohol would be Schedule I and cannabis would be sold in grocery stores. Instead, we get the reverse, because the metric is not harm—it’s history, racism, corporate lobbying, and state control.

How Prohibition Manufactures Harm

Prohibition doesn’t reduce drug use; it changes where, what, and how people use. It forces a basic human behavior—altering consciousness—into an unsafe, unregulated, criminalized market. Then politicians act shocked when that predictably explodes in harm.

Example 1: Fentanyl and the Contaminated Supply Disaster

Take the fentanyl crisis. We are not in a “fentanyl crisis” because people suddenly love fentanyl more than heroin. We’re in it because prohibition made it rational for suppliers to move toward more potent, compact, and profitable substances.

When you ban a substance but the demand stays, markets do what markets do: they get more efficient, more potent, and more dangerous. This is exactly what happened with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s—beer got replaced by moonshine. Today, heroin gets replaced by fentanyl analogs and other synthetics.

According to the U.S. CDC, over 80,000 people in the U.S. died from opioid overdoses in 2021, with the majority involving illicitly manufactured fentanyl. Many of those deaths are from people who had no idea what they were actually taking. That’s not a “drugs problem.” That is a prohibition-caused adulteration problem.

It would be trivial, technically and logistically, to have:

• Regulated, clearly labeled opioid products
• Quality control, dosage consistency, and recall mechanisms
• Supervised consumption sites and standardized education on safer use

We do this for alcohol. We do it for tobacco. We do it for prescription opioids when rich people get them. For everyone else, we hand them a contaminated street supply and call it “sending a message.” That message is clear: your life is expendable if it threatens the moral theater of prohibition.

Example 2: Portugal vs. the Punitive Status Quo

In 2001, Portugal did something radical by today’s timid standards: it decriminalized the possession of all drugs for personal use. Not legalized—decriminalized. People caught with small amounts don’t get arrested; they get referred to a panel that can recommend treatment, education, or, frankly, leave them alone if they’re fine.

The result? A huge, embarrassing counterpoint to every prohibitionist talking point:

• Drug deaths plummeted. Overdose deaths per million dropped from some of the highest in Western Europe to among the lowest.
• HIV infections from injecting drug use collapsed due to needle exchanges and health-centered approaches.
• Problematic use stabilized or declined, especially among youth.

The absolute nightmare scenario promised by drug warriors—open-air drug chaos, mass addiction, social collapse—never arrived. Instead, Portugal’s policy quietly put our punishment-obsessed model to shame.

Yet, two decades later, countries like the UK, the U.S., and many EU states still prefer mass incarceration, toxic supply, and police harassment, because it keeps budgets, careers, and entire bureaucracies justified. Your safety isn’t the point; maintaining the machinery is.

The Double Standard: Corporate Drugs vs. Criminal Drugs

Look at what’s legally sold and aggressively marketed:

• Alcohol: a carcinogen and neurotoxin, advertised to you during sports, holidays, and every “celebration.”
• Gambling: app-based casinos in your pocket 24/7, preying on vulnerable people with dopamine-optimized UX.
• Prescription psych drugs: SSRIs, benzos, stimulants—life-saving for some, harmful for others, overprescribed for many.

All of this is wrapped in glossy branding and sold as lifestyle, wellness, or “entertainment.” The same politicians who wring their hands over “drug use” go to alcohol-funded galas and take meetings with pharma lobbyists.

Meanwhile, someone growing psilocybin mushrooms for personal use or experimenting with MDMA for therapy risks criminal records, surveillance, and prison. The chemical structure isn’t the real issue. The real issue is who gets to own the supply and who gets to profit.

Drug Policy as a Tool of Social Control

Prohibition doesn’t fall evenly. It hits the poor, racialized, and marginalized first and hardest. That’s not a bug—it’s the design.

In the U.S., Black and white people use drugs at similar rates, yet Black Americans are far more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for drug offenses. ACLU analysis has shown that Black people are several times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession, despite no significant difference in use rates.

Globally, “drug control” justifies:

• Paramilitary policing and militarized raids in poor neighborhoods
• Border militarization and surveillance
• Asset forfeiture—governments legally stealing property “suspected” of being linked to drugs
• Authoritarian crackdowns disguised as “public safety” campaigns

People in suits call this “law and order.” On the ground, it looks like communities terrorized, livelihoods destroyed, and generations permanently marked by criminal records over non-violent conduct that should never have been a crime.

The Medicalization Trap: Freedom for Some, Control for Others

As psychedelics and cannabis edge into medical and therapeutic spaces, there’s a new narrative: “We’ll let you have some drugs, but only if a doctor, clinic, or corporation blesses it—and bills you for it.”

The medical route can absolutely help people. Legal access to MDMA-assisted therapy or psilocybin treatment is a huge step forward for many. But if we stop there, we’ve just built a more polite, more corporate version of prohibition.

Putting a white coat between you and your own nervous system is still control. It replaces cops with clinicians, prison with clinics, and street dealers with venture-funded ketamine chains—but the underlying principle remains: you are not trusted to own your consciousness.

Health care access is good. Choice is better. Policy that says “You can use this molecule only if we classify you as sick, bill your insurer, and run you through a gatekeeping system” is not liberation; it’s managed autonomy.

The Only Honest Standard: Bodily Autonomy for Adults

The ethical baseline isn’t complicated:

Informed adults have the right to put what they want into their own bodies, as long as they’re not harming others.

We apply this logic elsewhere:

• We don’t ban risky sports; we promote helmets, pads, and training.
• We don’t outlaw sex; we promote consent, contraception, and STI testing.
• We don’t ban cars; we build seatbelts, traffic rules, and crash standards.

With drugs, we did the exact opposite: we banned the activity, made it more dangerous, then used the resulting damage as an excuse to double down. That’s not protection—that’s policy malpractice.

What A Post-Prohibition World Looks Like

A sane, post-prohibition drug policy wouldn’t be a free-for-all. It would be regulated like we already regulate other risky but normal human activities. It would recognize that people will always use psychoactive substances and that the job of policy is to make that as safe, informed, and non-destructive as possible.

Core Elements of a Rational Drug Policy

Here’s what that could look like:

• Full decriminalization of personal possession and use. No more arrests for what adults choose to ingest. Police get out of the drug use business entirely.
• Legal, regulated supply channels. Different models for different drugs:
  • Cannabis: commercial sale, home grow, co-ops.
  • Psychedelics: licensed retreats, clinics, personal use allowances.
  • Opioids and stimulants: pharmacy-style, graded access, safe supply programs.
• Evidence-based education. Honest, non-hysterical information about effects, risks, and safer use techniques from a young age.
• Harm reduction everywhere. Drug checking, supervised consumption sites, naloxone, needle exchanges, peer support—treated as normal public health infrastructure.
• Expungement and repair. Automatic clearing of non-violent drug records, release of people imprisoned for personal-use and minor supply offenses, investment in communities devastated by the drug war.

This isn’t utopian. Pieces of this already exist: Portugal’s decriminalization model, Canada’s supervised injection sites, drug checking services at European festivals, medical cannabis in dozens of jurisdictions. The barrier isn’t feasibility—it’s political cowardice and institutional self-interest.

Why Reform Isn’t Enough: Prohibition Has To Go

Decriminalization alone is a start, but it leaves the supply side in criminal hands. Medicalization alone is a start, but it leaves autonomy in corporate and clinical hands. We need something more fundamental: the end of prohibition as a governing logic.

Any system that says, “These consciousness-altering substances are reserved for those with power, money, or a doctor’s note; everyone else risks punishment” is just prohibition in a nicer outfit.

Ending prohibition means:

• Admitting the war on drugs is an irredeemable failure that killed far more people than it “saved.”
• Defunding the carceral, militarized responses to drug use.
• Rebuilding policy from the ground up around bodily autonomy, harm reduction, and human rights.

That requires governments to admit they were wrong. It requires police forces, prisons, courts, and drug agencies to lose power and money. Don’t expect them to volunteer for that. They will cling to prohibition as long as they can rebrand it—“public safety,” “addiction response,” “synthetic drug crisis”—anything but what it really is: a war on people.

The Bottom Line: You Own Your Mind, Not the State

The core question underneath drug policy isn’t pharmacology; it’s power.

Who owns your nervous system? Who decides what altered states you are allowed to visit—or whether you’re allowed to visit them at all? Who gets to profit from those states? Who gets punished for them?

Right now, the answers are:

• The state claims the right to punish you for what you put in your own body.
• Corporations claim the right to sell you their approved drugs, from alcohol to SSRIs, with legal protection.
• You get “freedom” only in the narrow spaces they carve out—and only on their terms.

That arrangement is not natural, moral, or inevitable. It’s a political choice, and it can be undone.

Ending drug prohibition is not about being “pro-drug.” It’s about being pro-truth, pro-autonomy, and pro-adult. It’s about recognizing that people have always used psychoactive substances and always will, and that the role of a sane society is to reduce harm, share knowledge, and get out of people’s private lives—not to police their inner worlds.

You don’t need the state’s permission to be sober, spiritual, intoxicated, ecstatic, or introspective. You do not owe your consciousness to governments or corporations. And until our laws reflect that, they will remain what they have always been in this arena: instruments of control masquerading as concern.

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