The Real Crime Is Prohibition: How the War on Drugs Became a War on People

The biggest drug problem on Earth isn’t cocaine, fentanyl, meth, or heroin. It’s prohibition.

Decades into the so-called “war on drugs,” we’re drowning in overdoses, mass incarceration, contaminated supply, and militarized policing. The only clear winners are cartels, corrupt officials, and the industries that profit off cages and misery. The losers? Ordinary people whose bodies, autonomy, and futures have been sacrificed on the altar of “public safety.”

Let’s be very clear: the problem is not that people use psychoactive substances. Humans have always used drugs—for pleasure, pain relief, spirituality, coping, and curiosity. The crisis comes from criminalizing that reality, outsourcing the entire market to organized crime, and then pretending the blood on the floor belongs to anyone except the architects of prohibition.

The War on Drugs Was Never About Safety

If this were about health, we’d regulate drugs like we do alcohol and tobacco: age limits, quality control, labeling, dosing information, and health education. Instead, we get SWAT raids, mandatory minimums, and headlines about “the scourge of addiction” while governments block safe supply and supervised use.

The modern drug war didn’t fall out of the sky. It was engineered.

In the United States, Nixon famously declared drugs “public enemy number one” in 1971. His own domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, later admitted the strategy wasn’t about fentanyl or heroin—it was about criminalizing Black people and anti-war activists:

“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 logic got exported worldwide through trade pressure, international treaties, and a steady drumbeat of moral panic. Countries signed on to UN drug conventions under economic and political pressure, not out of some universal epiphany about public health. The result: a global regime that punishes plants and powders more harshly than corporate fraud that ruins millions of lives.

Meanwhile, Legal Drug Pushers Get a Free Pass

Let’s talk hypocrisy, because prohibition is built on it.

Alcohol kills around 3 million people a year globally, according to the WHO. Tobacco kills about 8 million a year. Both are fully legal. Both are aggressively marketed. Both have entire industries lobbying to keep profits high and regulations weak.

Meanwhile, possession of a small quantity of a banned substance can destroy your life in half the world.

In the U.S., Purdue Pharma and other opioid manufacturers aggressively pushed OxyContin and similar pills under the lie that they were “low risk” and “rarely addictive.” Between 1999 and 2021, over 645,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. That crisis was not caused by a guy selling a few pills to pay rent—it was corporate policy, greenlit by captured regulators and a medical system financially pressured to over-prescribe.

What was the response? A few fines—pocket change compared to the profits—and carefully crafted “no admission of wrongdoing” settlements. Executives walked away rich. At the same time, street-level users and small-time sellers have been locked in cages for years or decades.

If you think the law is about safety, not power, you’re not paying attention.

Prohibition Creates the Very Dangers It Claims to Prevent

Every politician who says “drugs are dangerous, that’s why they must be illegal” is leaving out one critical detail: the most extreme dangers exist because they are illegal.

Example 1: Fentanyl in the Dark Market

Fentanyl didn’t just appear because “the world got more sinful.” It appeared because prohibition made it strategically smart for illicit markets to move toward more potent, compact substances that are easier to smuggle.

If you sell in a legal market, you care about consistency, safety, and brand reputation. If your product kills clients, you lose business and invite regulation. If you sell in an illegal market, you care about avoiding detection and maximizing profits per gram. Potent synthetic opioids solve that problem—at the cost of human lives.

Unregulated street opioids are like playing Russian roulette:

• You don’t know the dose.
• You don’t know the adulterants.
• You don’t know the potency compared to last time.

In Canada and the U.S., we now see record overdose deaths year after year, largely driven by a contaminated and unpredictable supply. Harm reduction workers, supervised consumption sites, and drug-checking services have shown over and over: when people know what they’re taking and can use in safer conditions, deaths drop.

Yet in many regions, those services are under attack or tightly constrained, while police still proudly post photos of “busts” that barely scratch the surface of supply. We criminalized the safer drugs, forced people to rely on illicit sources, and then act shocked when the supply turns lethal. That’s not “unintended consequences.” That’s policy failure.

Example 2: Alcohol Prohibition vs. Today’s Black Markets

We’ve already done this experiment. The U.S. tried alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. The result:

• Massive growth of organized crime.
• Corrupt cops and politicians on cartel payrolls.
• People poisoned by toxic, bootleg alcohol.

When alcohol was re-legalized, the violence and contamination dropped dramatically. Did alcohol suddenly become “safe”? No. But the most extreme harms were reduced by bringing production into a regulated, visible market.

Now we’re repeating the same stupidity with other drugs—except this time we have nearly a century of evidence that prohibition cannot “solve” drug use. It can only make it more dangerous.

Mass Incarceration: The Human Cost of Moral Panic

The war on drugs has filled prisons faster than any public-health crisis in history. It’s not just in one country; it’s global. But let’s zoom in on some especially glaring numbers.

In the United States:

• Nearly one in five people in prison are there for a drug offense.
• Black Americans are almost four times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than white Americans, despite similar usage rates (ACLU data).

Globally:

• The UN estimates that around one in five people in prison worldwide are there for drug offenses, many for simple possession or low-level dealing.
• In some countries, minor drug offenses can mean decades in prison—or the death penalty.

This is not targeted at “kingpins” and “cartel bosses.” It’s overwhelmingly hitting the poor, racialized, and marginalized—the people with the least power, the fewest legal resources, and the smallest role in the actual drug economy.

Meanwhile, banks like HSBC were caught laundering money for major drug cartels and terrorist organizations. They got fines. No CEOs in orange jumpsuits. No dawn raids with battering rams. If you move a few grams on the street, you’re a “dangerous criminal.” If you move millions through a banking system, you’re a “valued financial institution.”

Countries That Stopped Panicking and Started Thinking

For anyone still clinging to “but if we legalize, everything will collapse,” there are real-world counterexamples that destroy that argument.

Portugal: Decriminalization Without the Apocalypse

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized possession of all drugs for personal use. Not legalized—decriminalized. People caught with small amounts don’t get a criminal record; they’re referred to a “dissuasion commission” focused on health and support, not punishment.

What happened?

• Overdose deaths plummeted compared to other EU countries.
• HIV infection rates among people who inject drugs fell sharply.
• Drug use among youth did not explode into chaos; in some cases, it stabilized or even decreased.

Portugal isn’t a utopia and has its own challenges, but it proved one thing beyond denial: you don’t need to criminalize users to reduce harm. The “if we don’t punish them, everyone will start using drugs” narrative is a scare tactic, not evidence.

Cannabis Legalization: The Sky Is Still Intact

Canada fully legalized cannabis in 2018. As of now:

• The legal market has captured a huge share of sales from illicit dealers.
• Adults can buy lab-tested, labeled products with known THC/CBD levels.
• No, society did not collapse into a haze of reefer madness.

Multiple U.S. states have done the same with broadly similar outcomes: tax revenue up, arrests down, and the world still turning. The main legal problem now? Many jurisdictions refuse to automatically clear old cannabis convictions, meaning people remain branded criminals for something that’s now a government-sanctioned business.

That’s not justice. That’s open, unapologetic hypocrisy.

What Real Reform Looks Like: Beyond Cosmetic Change

Tinkering around the edges of prohibition is like repainting a prison and calling it “restorative justice.” If we actually care about reducing harm, protecting bodily autonomy, and dismantling carceral control, we need structural change.

1. Decriminalize Possession and Personal Use

No adult should face criminal punishment for what they put in their own body. Period.

Decriminalization means:

• No arrests, no criminal records, no cages for possession.
• Redirecting resources from enforcement to voluntary support and harm reduction.
• Stopping the cycle where a single drug charge ruins employment, housing, and education for life.

This is the floor, not the ceiling. But it’s a necessary first step to stop actively harming people in the name of “helping” them.

2. Legalize and Regulate Production and Supply

Decriminalizing users while keeping supply illegal is like banning plane crashes but keeping unregulated, blindfolded pilots. If the market remains in the shadows, contamination, violence, and exploitation remain inevitable.

A sane model includes:

• Regulated production with testing, purity standards, and consistent dosing.
• Age restrictions similar to or stricter than alcohol for certain drugs.
• Labeling so people know what they are taking, at what dose, with what risks.
• Tiered access for higher-risk drugs (e.g., supervised dispensing, prescription-style models, or supervised consumption for potent opioids).

Will some people still struggle with addiction? Yes—just as they already do with alcohol, gambling, and legal prescriptions. The difference is that we can finally respond with health strategies that aren’t constantly sabotaged by criminalization.

3. Fully Fund Harm Reduction and Evidence-Based Treatment

Harm reduction is simple: people will use drugs, so let’s make that as safe as possible and provide non-judgmental support.

That means:

• Supervised consumption sites.
• Drug checking (including take-home test strips and spectrometry at events).
• Legal, safe supply for dependent users, especially opioids.
• Non-coercive treatment options that don’t require hitting rock-bottom or getting arrested first.

Where these exist, deaths drop. Infectious disease transmission drops. Public disorder drops. But governments still fight them because they conflict with the moral fantasy that the only acceptable messages about drugs are “Just say no” or “Go to jail.”

4. Repair the Damage: Expungement and Restitution

Ending prohibition without dealing with the wreckage it left behind is just another form of injustice.

Real reform demands:

• Automatic expungement of past drug possession and minor supply convictions where similar conduct is now legal or tolerated.
• Releasing people serving time for non-violent drug offenses.
• Investing in communities that were deliberately targeted and over-policed under the drug war.

If someone did 10 years for a cannabis grow that would be a licensed business today, they’re owed more than a shrug and “times have changed.”

Bodily Autonomy Means All of It—Including Drug Use

You either believe adults own their bodies, or you don’t. There’s no carve-out where autonomy magically evaporates because someone chooses to alter their consciousness with a substance politicians disapprove of.

We let people climb mountains, drink themselves sick, race motorcycles, eat ultra-processed food, and refuse medical treatment, even when those decisions involve clear risks. Yet when it comes to drugs, suddenly the state claims the right to burst through doors, seize property, take children, and lock people in cages—all “for their own good.”

That’s not health policy. That’s control.

People deserve honest information, safer options, and support if they want it—not surveillance, punishment, and stigma. Adults are capable of informed consent. The job of public policy is to create conditions where that consent can be meaningful—not to override it entirely.

Time to Stop Pretending Prohibition Is Anything But a Failure

We know what works: decriminalization, regulation, harm reduction, and respecting people as agents over their own lives. We know what doesn’t: criminalizing users, waging war on supply we can never actually eliminate, and letting underground markets dictate what’s in the drugs people are going to take regardless.

So when governments cling to prohibition, it’s not because the evidence supports it. It’s because prohibition is politically convenient. It justifies bloated police budgets, lets leaders posture as “tough on crime,” and keeps marginalized populations under constant threat of surveillance and arrest.

Ending the war on drugs isn’t some radical fever dream. It’s the logical conclusion if you care about:

• Reducing overdose deaths.
• Weakening organized crime.
• Shrinking the prison population.
• Protecting bodily autonomy and civil liberties.

The radical position is the one we’re living under now: trusting cartels, corrupt officials, and profit-hungry corporations to shape the drug landscape, while pretending that locking up users is “public safety.”

Prohibition is the crime scene. The war on drugs is the weapon. It’s long past time we disarmed it.

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