Why “Legalization Will Flood Society With Addicts” Is a Lazy Myth

Prohibitionists love a good scare line. One of their greatest hits: “If we legalize or even decriminalize drugs, addiction will explode and society will collapse.” You’ve heard the script—streets full of zombies, kids instantly hooked, ERs overflowing, morality in ruins. According to this logic, the only thing standing between us and total chaos is a SWAT team, a prison cell, and endless urine tests.

It’s emotionally powerful. It’s also empirically wrong.

When you stop running on moral panic and start looking at actual data—from Portugal’s decriminalization to legal cannabis in multiple countries—the scary story falls apart. Not only does prohibition fail to prevent addiction; it actively worsens harm, fuels black markets, and hands the entire drug supply to the least accountable people in the system: illegal suppliers and cartels.

The Prohibitionist Claim in Plain Language

Let’s strip the argument down to its core:

Prohibitionist claim: If drugs are decriminalized or legalized and regulated:

• More people will start using drugs.
• More people will become addicted.
• Public health systems will be overwhelmed.
• Crime will skyrocket.
• “Society” (vaguely defined, but definitely in danger) will deteriorate.

The implied solution? Keep criminal penalties, keep the black market, keep punishing users, maybe throw in some “Just Say No” posters for good measure. In other words: double down on a strategy that’s already failed for decades.

Now let’s do what prohibitionists avoid: check this against reality.

Portugal: The Policy Change Prohibitionists Pretend Doesn’t Exist

When you mention decriminalization, Portugal is the case that makes drug warriors shuffle their papers and change the subject.

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the possession and personal use of all drugs—yes, all of them, including heroin and cocaine. Not “anything goes,” not “you can sell crack in a kindergarten,” but:

• Personal possession = no criminal record.
• Usage handled as a health issue, not a crime.
• Resources shifted toward treatment, harm reduction, and social support.

What actually happened?

Spoiler: the apocalypse did not arrive.

• Overdose deaths dropped sharply. Portugal went from one of the worst overdose rates in Western Europe to one of the lowest. Multiple evaluations attribute this largely to decriminalization plus health services, not punishment.
• HIV infections among people who inject drugs plummeted. Safer supply, needle programs, and health access beat moral lectures and prison cells by a mile.
• Problematic use did not spike. The share of the population with so-called “problem drug use” either remained stable or decreased slightly, depending on the time window and measure.

In other words: when Portugal stopped treating users like criminals and started treating them like humans, the nightmare predictions failed to materialize. Instead, public health indicators improved and the social disaster… didn’t happen.

That’s not utopia. Portugal still has problems, like every country. But the “legalization = tidal wave of addiction” argument collapses the second you look at Portugal’s data. Prohibitionists either ignore it or twist details to avoid the obvious: decriminalization is safer for people than criminalization.

Legal Cannabis: The World’s Most Boring “Drug Panic” Outcome

The cannabis story is even more damning for the prohibitionist position because it’s now playing out across multiple jurisdictions at scale.

Countries and states with legal or quasi-legal cannabis include:

• Canada (nationwide legalization)
• Uruguay (nationwide legalization)
• Dozens of US states (legal for adult use)
• Several European countries with medical or partial legal frameworks

Did legalization create an army of new stoners?

Here’s what large-scale studies and government reports tend to show:

• Adult use: small increases, not explosions. Where adult use goes up, it’s typically modest—hardly the mass-addiction crisis promised. Many people who consume were already using under prohibition, just more dangerously.
• Youth use: flat or down, not up. Repeated data from US states and from Canada show no consistent surge in youth cannabis use post-legalization. In some places, adolescent use has actually declined. Turns out regulated shops that card customers are better at age control than street dealers.
• Arrests fall dramatically. Cannabis possession and use go from “crime” to “legal consumer behavior,” which means fewer arrests, fewer records, less life-ruining contact with the criminal legal system—especially for communities that were historically over-policed.
• No collapse of productivity or social order. Countries that legalized didn’t fall into chaos. Their biggest issue? Over-regulation, corporate capture, and tax policy—not mass psychosis in the streets.

If the prohibitionist thesis were correct, these jurisdictions should look like dystopian PSAs right now. Instead, they look like normal societies with one extra legal product on the shelf—and fewer people having their doors kicked in over a plant.

Prohibition Doesn’t Prevent Use. It Just Makes It More Dangerous.

The central fantasy of prohibition is that law and punishment can stop people from altering their consciousness. Alcohol prohibition disproved that in the 1920s. The global drug war has been disproving it ever since.

Here’s what prohibition actually does:

• Hands the supply to unregulated markets. Because drugs don’t disappear when you ban them; they just move to the black market, where potency, purity, and contamination are wildly unpredictable.
• Supercharges potency and profit. Traffickers favor high-potency, compact products (fentanyl vs. heroin, high-purity powders vs. bulkier forms) because they’re easier to smuggle and more profitable. This has nothing to do with “user preference” and everything to do with prohibition distortions.
• Criminalizes people who need help. Someone using chaotically is more likely to get police attention than health support. Fear of arrest keeps people away from services and honest conversations with doctors, employers, and family.
• Targets marginalized communities. Enforcement is never neutral. Racialized, poor, and already stigmatized groups are policed harder, sentenced more harshly, and surveilled more intensely.

If your real goal is to reduce addiction and harm, creating a criminalized, toxic, unpredictable supply is about the worst policy design you could invent. Prohibition is a harm-maximization system wearing a “public safety” costume.

“But If It’s Legal, More People Will Try It!”

This is the prohibitionist fallback: even if harms per user decrease, they argue, a bigger pool of users will offset these gains. Let’s take that seriously for a moment and walk through why it still doesn’t justify criminalization.

1. Adults already use drugs under prohibition.

Alcohol, cannabis, stimulants, opioids, psychedelics—people are already using them, illegally or semi-legally. The idea that legalization “creates” demand ignores reality. It mostly moves existing demand into safer, more transparent channels.

2. Experimentation does not equal addiction.

Most people who use drugs do not develop a substance use disorder. That’s not romanticizing use; it’s just basic epidemiology. The vast majority of alcohol users aren’t alcohol-dependent. Same with cannabis and many other substances. Addiction risk is shaped by:

• Social determinants (poverty, trauma, isolation)
• Mental health status
• Environment and support systems
• Patterns and frequency of use

Blaming the legal status of the substance while ignoring everything else is lazy and politically convenient—but not evidence-based.

3. Legalization enables early intervention and honest education.

When something is illegal, people hide it—especially young people. That hampers early support, realistic information, and non-judgmental interventions. A regulated, de-stigmatized environment is actually better for catching risky patterns early and offering help without the threat of a record.

4. Even if use rises slightly, harms can still fall.

Public health is about harm per capita and total burden, not moral purity. If pure, unregulated fentanyl on the street is replaced by known-dose, pharmaceutical-grade opioids dispensed in a supervised program, you could see:

• Fewer overdose deaths
• Less infectious disease
• Less crime linked to financing expensive black-market purchases
• Less policing, incarceration, and collateral damage

A small bump in people willing to admit their use in surveys is not a crisis. Thousands fewer deaths and less human misery? That’s a win.

Regulated Supply: The Thing That Actually Reduces Harm

“Legalization” is often caricatured as a free-for-all, but that’s not how serious advocates envision it. The realistic alternative to prohibition is legally regulated supply with controls proportionate to the risk of the substance.

Think of a spectrum:

• Low-risk substances (e.g., cannabis for most adults): Retail-style regulation, age limits, labeling, taxation, marketing restrictions.
• Moderate-risk substances (e.g., certain stimulants): Pharmacy or supervised distribution, strict packaging and dose controls, mandatory health information.
• High-risk substances (e.g., injectable opioids): Medicalized, on-site consumption, supervised injectable programs, or tightly controlled prescription models.

Real-world examples already exist:

• Heroin-assisted treatment in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere: people with long-term opioid dependence receive prescribed, pharmaceutical heroin in supervised clinics.
• Outcomes: fewer overdoses, reduced street drug use, less drug-related crime, improved health and social stability. Again: no collapse of society, just fewer chaotic lives.
• Supervised consumption sites (Canada, Europe, Australia): people use their own drugs under supervision, with sterile equipment and naloxone available. These facilities are associated with lower overdose death rates and better access to services—not with attracting “new users.”

Regulated supply makes drugs boring from a criminal perspective. No huge risk premium, no cartel markups, no incentive to cut with dangerous adulterants. You know what destroys the high-profit black market? Not more cops. A pharmacy.

The Hypocrisy: Corporate Drugs Good, Non-Corporate Drugs Evil

Here’s where the prohibitionist moral sermon really falls apart.

We live in societies where:

• Alcohol—one of the most harmful drugs in terms of overall social impact—is heavily marketed, normalized, and taxed.
• Pharmaceutical opioids were aggressively pushed by corporations, with regulators asleep at the wheel, triggering massive dependence and overdoses.
• Anti-anxiety meds, sleeping pills, and stimulants are widely prescribed, often in ways that blur the line between medical need and chemical coping mechanism.

In this context, moral panic about someone growing a plant or using non-pharmaceutical psychoactives is not about “health.” It’s about control, power, and which drugs are allowed to make money for which institutions.

If the state truly believed that “any mind-altering substance is a threat,” alcohol would be tightly controlled or banned, pharma malpractice would be prosecuted like a war crime, and marketing psychoactive substances would be heavily restricted. Instead, we get:

• Alcohol ads during sports games.
• Corporate settlements where no executive sees the inside of a cell, despite thousands of overdose deaths.
• Brutal enforcement against small-time users and street dealers.

The message is clear: drugs are fine when they’re profitable for the right people and routed through the right institutions. The problem, apparently, is unlicensed consciousness alteration.

What a Rational Drug Policy Could Look Like

If we drop the moral panic and start acting like adults, a better framework isn’t hard to imagine. It would include:

• Decriminalization of simple possession and use. No one should be arrested, fined into poverty, or caged for what they put in their own body.
• Legally regulated markets and medical access. Different substances, different models—but all with quality control, labeling, known dosages, and age limits.
• Robust harm reduction services. Drug checking, supervised consumption, naloxone distribution, low-threshold treatment, housing support, mental health care.
• Taxation tied to health and social services—not to maximizing sales. Use revenues for treatment, education, and community support, not just general coffers.
• Evidence-based education instead of scare tactics. Teach actual pharmacology, risk, dosage, and safer-use practices. People make better decisions when you stop lying to them.

This isn’t fantasy. Pieces of this model exist already, scattered across different countries and cities, working in spite of constant political sabotage.

So, Does Legalization “Increase Addiction”?

If by “increase addiction” you mean:

• More honest reporting of use because people aren’t scared of admitting it
• More people accessing help because they’re not criminalized
• More visibility of drug use that was already happening in the shadows

Then maybe yes, in the same way that de-stigmatizing mental health “increased” depression—by making it visible and discussable.

But if you mean:

• A tidal wave of new people suddenly addicted purely because substances became legal
• Overdoses skyrocketing in regular, regulated environments
• Society unraveling because adults can access a controlled supply

The evidence says no. That’s not what happens. That’s what prohibitionists threatened would happen, and it keeps not happening wherever sensible reform is tried.

The Real Question: Who Controls the Risk—People or Prohibition?

The debate isn’t “drugs or no drugs.” We already live in a drug-using society and always will. The real question is:

• Do we want unregulated, criminalized, stigmatized use, with a toxic supply controlled by people who thrive in the shadows?
• Or regulated, transparent, health-centered use, with quality control, oversight, and support?

Prohibitionists cling to punishment because it saves them from having to admit a simple truth: adults have the right to make decisions about their own bodies, even decisions others wouldn’t personally choose. The state’s job is not to wage war on those choices—it’s to reduce avoidable harm, respect autonomy, and stop enabling a black-market bloodbath.

Drugs don’t destroy society. Stigma, criminalization, poverty, and state-sanctioned ignorance do. Legalization with regulation doesn’t magically fix everything. But it gives us tools—real tools—to reduce harm, respect freedom, and finally retire the tired, fear-based myths that have justified a decades-long war on people.

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