The War on Drugs Is a War on People: Why Prohibition Has to Die

The war on drugs is not a war on substances. It’s a war on people — especially poor people, racialized communities, and anyone who dares to exercise bodily autonomy outside state-approved intoxication (read: alcohol and pharma). After more than 50 years of this disaster, the only honest policy conversation left is this: prohibition has to go.

This isn’t about being “soft on drugs.” It’s about being done with policies that are cruel, ineffective, and scientifically illiterate, while governments pretend they’re “protecting” us as they push alcohol, opioids, gambling, and endless consumer addiction through every legal channel possible.

The Big Lie: “We’re Doing This for Your Safety”

Politicians love to hide behind “public health” while deploying riot cops, armored vehicles, and prison beds. If this is a health issue, why does it look like a military campaign?

Consider the outcomes of decades of prohibition:

• According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the global number of people who use drugs has risen over the last 20 years, not fallen — despite more enforcement, more raids, more incarceration.
• The U.S. alone spends over $40 billion per year on the war on drugs across policing, courts, and incarceration, and yet overdose deaths reached a record high of over 100,000 deaths in 2021, largely driven by an unregulated, contaminated opioid supply.

If this were any other policy area, it would’ve been scrapped decades ago. Imagine a bridge program that “fixes” infrastructure by making bridges more dangerous, more expensive, and killing more people. No one would call that “pro-bridge safety.” But slap “drugs” on it and suddenly we tolerate mass failure as long as it’s dressed in moral panic.

Prohibition Doesn’t Eliminate Drugs — It Eliminates Safety

Drugs do not disappear under prohibition. They just become more dangerous, more potent, and more profitable for organized crime. That’s not an accident; it’s baked into the economics of banning anything in demand.

Take the current fentanyl crisis. Fentanyl isn’t some spontaneous evil molecule that suddenly invaded the world. It’s what happens when you squeeze supply with prohibition and smugly call it “cracking down.” Smaller, more potent substances are easier to traffic, conceal, and profit from. We went from heroin to fentanyl to increasingly potent analogues because prohibition rewards the strongest, smallest, most compact product.

People aren’t dying because they take drugs. They’re dying because they’re using a mystery powder from a criminalized, unregulated market while politicians brag about “seizing record quantities” and then go to fundraising dinners sponsored by alcohol, pharma, and private prison interests.

Meanwhile, Legal Drugs Get a Free Pass

Let’s talk hypocrisy. Alcohol is one of the most harmful drugs out there when you combine physical, psychological, and social harms. The World Health Organization estimated that alcohol was responsible for about 3 million deaths per year globally. It’s involved in violence, accidents, liver disease, and a long list of cancers.

Is alcohol banned? Of course not. It’s marketed during sports games, shoved into every social ritual, and treated as a cultural default. The only people who get punished are those who misuse it in specific ways — not those who sell it, brand it, glamorize it, or profit from it.

Then there’s the pharmaceutical industry, which helped create the opioid crisis in North America and beyond. Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed OxyContin while downplaying addiction risks, leading to massive waves of dependence and overdose. States are still suing over the damage. Millions got hooked via legal prescriptions, written by doctors, pushed by corporations, greenlit by regulators.

Curiously, the punishment didn’t look like a SWAT team kicking down Purdue’s door and dragging executives out in handcuffs. Instead, we got settlements, fines, and “no admission of wrongdoing.” All while users — the people actually suffering — were arrested, stigmatized, and left to die in a poisoned illicit market once prescriptions dried up.

This is not about “health.” It’s about who is allowed to profit from drug markets and who gets cages instead of care.

Criminalization Is a Tool of Social Control

Drug laws are not applied equally. They never have been. They’re a precision instrument for targeting certain populations while pretending we’re battling a chemical enemy. A few examples:

• In the United States, Black people and white people use drugs at similar rates, yet Black people are far more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for drug offenses. The ACLU reported that Black people were almost 4 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than white people, despite similar usage rates.
• In the UK, data from StopWatch and Release show that drug laws are disproportionately enforced against Black and brown communities, especially through stop-and-search powers — often justified under the banner of “fighting drugs.”

Drug prohibition has always been about control and cultural policing. The early 20th-century bans on opium in North America were deeply tied to anti-Chinese racism. Anti-cannabis laws were pushed with rhetoric about “Mexican” users and “Negroes” corrupting white women. The so-called crack epidemic was met with the full rage of militarized policing and mandatory minimums; the largely white prescription opioid crisis was framed as a tragedy deserving treatment and sympathy.

Same drugs, different demographics, different moral narratives. That’s not public health. That’s strategic social control.

Example 1: Portugal Shows What Happens When You Stop Treating Users Like Criminals

Portugal decriminalized the personal possession of all drugs in 2001. Contrary to the panic-mongering, the country did not collapse into chaos. People did not immediately inject heroin into their eyeballs in the town square.

What actually happened?

• Drug-related deaths fell dramatically. Portugal now has one of the lowest drug-related death rates in Europe.
• HIV transmission among people who inject drugs plummeted — from over 1,000 new cases per year in 2000 to just dozens in recent years.
• Problematic use remained relatively stable or decreased, while overall social and health harms fell.

Important detail: Portugal did not legalize drugs in a commercial, alcohol-style free-for-all. It simply stopped criminally prosecuting people for possessing small amounts for personal use, redirecting them toward health services if needed. Dealers still face criminal penalties. Yet even this mild step — just not treating users as criminals — had major positive outcomes.

This completely destroys the lazy claim that only punishment can “keep people safe.” Turns out, people don’t need the constant threat of prison to make rational choices about their own bodies. What they actually need is access to clean supply, honest information, and non-judgmental support.

Example 2: The North American Overdose Crisis Is a Policy-Made Catastrophe

North America is living through an overdose emergency, and prohibition is pouring gasoline on it.

In the United States, the CDC reported over 100,000 overdose deaths in 2021 alone, with synthetic opioids like fentanyl driving the surge. In Canada, in British Columbia — the province that has declared a public health emergency — thousands have died since 2016 due to a toxic unregulated supply.

Here’s the part politicians never want to say out loud: these deaths are not caused by “drugs” in some abstract way. They’re caused by uncertain dosing, contamination, and a criminalized market. When people don’t know what they’re taking — or how strong it is — risk spikes.

We have solutions that work:

• Supervised consumption sites where people can use drugs under medical supervision with oxygen and naloxone on hand.
• Drug checking and testing services that can detect fentanyl and other adulterants.
• Prescribed safer supply programs where people can access regulated opioids instead of street poison.

Meanwhile, in many jurisdictions, politicians block or sabotage these interventions, then act mystified when the death toll keeps rising. In some cases they actively shut down supervised consumption sites or refuse to fund safer supply — while opioid deaths climb. That’s not ignorance; at this point, it looks like negligence wrapped in moral panic.

Ending Prohibition Is Not a Radical Idea — Clinging to It Is

We’ve already tried prohibition before. It was called alcohol Prohibition in the United States (1920–1933), and it was such a spectacular failure that we usually only see it in history books and gangster movies. It generated violent black markets, empowered organized crime, fueled corruption, and didn’t stop people from drinking. Sound familiar?

We eventually repealed alcohol Prohibition not because everyone suddenly loved booze, but because the policy was obviously doing more harm than good. Society didn’t end. People didn’t lose all self-control. Instead, alcohol became regulated: age limits, labeling, licensing, quality control, and some basic (if inconsistent) public health messaging.

We could do the same for other drugs. Ending prohibition doesn’t mean unleashing a drug free-for-all. It means this:

• Adults have the right to use drugs — including currently illegal ones — without being criminalized.
• Production and distribution are brought into a regulated framework: quality control, potency limits, labeling, taxation, and health warnings.
• People who develop problems with use get support, not arrests.
• Police stop acting as moral enforcers of intoxication choices and focus on actual crimes with victims.

The only reason this is painted as “radical” is that governments are deeply invested — politically, financially, and ideologically — in the prohibition machine they’ve built. Ending it would mean admitting they were catastrophically wrong for half a century and that countless lives were destroyed for nothing. That’s a hard pill to swallow (pun intended), but the alternative is to let more people die to protect political egos and institutional inertia.

Harm Reduction: The Policy Prohibitionists Pretend Doesn’t Exist

When prohibitionists say, “If we legalize, people will die,” they’re quietly erasing an entire body of evidence-based strategies that reduce risk without demanding abstinence. Harm reduction treats people like adults with agency, not children to be scared straight.

Harm reduction includes:

• Needle and syringe programs to prevent HIV and hepatitis C.
• Supervised consumption sites to prevent overdose and connect people to services.
• Drug checking so people know what they’re actually taking.
• Substitution and safer supply, such as methadone, buprenorphine, and prescribed hydromorphone or diacetylmorphine.
• Non-judgmental education about dosing, combinations, and safer use practices.

The evidence is overwhelming: these interventions save lives, reduce disease transmission, and do not increase overall drug use. But because they don’t fit the punishment-first ideology, they’re attacked, defunded, or buried under bureaucracy.

Prohibitionists cling to the fantasy that if services are harsh and miserable enough, people will simply stop using. That’s not policy; that’s cruelty cosplaying as morality.

Bodily Autonomy Means All of It — Including Drug Use

At the core of this fight is a simple principle: your body is yours. Full stop. If adults can consent to sex, surgery, pregnancy, alcohol, extreme sports, cosmetic procedures, and experimental finance, they can consent to altering their consciousness with substances.

The state has no legitimate authority to micromanage which molecules may pass your blood-brain barrier. Its only defensible role is to ensure you have accurate information, access to safer options, and protection from fraud, violence, and coercion.

People will always seek relief, pleasure, transcendence, stimulation, and escape. That’s not a pathology; it’s human. The question is whether we build policy around reality — or around punishment fantasies that kill people in the name of “protection.”

So What Does a Post-Prohibition World Look Like?

Ending prohibition doesn’t mean flipping a switch overnight. It means deliberate, staged, evidence-based reform. A serious roadmap could look like this:

1. Immediate Decriminalization of Personal Possession

No one should go to jail, lose their job, lose their housing, or lose their kids simply for possessing drugs for personal use. Remove criminal penalties for possession and small-scale cultivation/production for personal consumption.

2. Mass Expungement and Release

Automatically expunge past low-level drug convictions. Prioritize release of those incarcerated solely for personal possession and small non-violent supply offenses. If we can use software to track every online ad you see, we can use it to clear records en masse.

3. Scale Up Harm Reduction Nationwide

Fund supervised consumption sites, safer supply, naloxone distribution, and drug checking everywhere. Treat overdose and infectious disease like the health issues they are, not morality plays.

4. Legal, Regulated Markets for Commonly Used Substances

Start with cannabis, then move toward regulated access for psychedelics, stimulants, and opioids — with careful frameworks: age restrictions, controlled points of sale, potency controls, plain packaging where appropriate, and public health-based messaging.

5. Shift Resources from Policing to Services

Reallocate a chunk of the billions wasted on drug enforcement to housing, mental health care, income support, and voluntary treatment. You don’t need a criminology degree to understand that stable housing and income reduce chaotic use far more effectively than handcuffs.

6. Democratic Oversight, Not Corporate Capture

Legalization doesn’t mean handing everything to the same corporate vultures that helped create the opioid crisis. We need public, cooperative, and community-based models; strong conflict-of-interest rules; caps on market dominance; and policies that actually prioritize public health over profit.

Stop Pretending This Is Working

The war on drugs has failed on its own stated terms: drugs are widely available, potent, and profitable. But it has succeeded on its unofficial terms: it has justified mass surveillance, militarized policing, racial profiling, bloated prison systems, and political theater for “tough on crime” campaigns.

Every overdose death from a contaminated supply is an indictment of prohibition. Every young person saddled with a criminal record for a small amount of drugs while alcohol brands sponsor national sports is an indictment of prohibition. Every family ripped apart by incarceration instead of supported through harm reduction is an indictment of prohibition.

We don’t need to tinker around the edges anymore. We don’t need another “task force,” another “crackdown,” another round of fearmongering ads funded by the same governments that profit off alcohol and pharma. We need to end the war on drugs — which is really a war on people — and replace it with a model based on autonomy, evidence, and basic human decency.

The choice is not “drugs or no drugs.” The choice is this: do we want a world where drugs are controlled by cartels, contaminated supply, and cops — or by science, transparency, and human rights?

Prohibition had its century. It failed. Time to bury it.

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