Why “Legalization Will Make Everyone Addicted” Is a Lazy Myth (And What the Data Really Says)

“If we legalize drugs, everyone will get addicted and society will collapse.”

That’s the go-to prohibitionist argument, usually delivered with a mix of moral panic and zero citations. It’s been used for over a century to justify criminalizing people, militarizing police, and pouring billions into a “war on drugs” that can’t even win a skirmish against basic economics.

Let’s be clear: adults using psychoactive substances is not some bizarre anomaly — it’s a normal, ancient human behavior. What’s abnormal is locking people in cages for it while pretending that prohibition magically prevents harm. Spoiler: it doesn’t. It creates it.

This article takes the favorite prohibitionist talking point — “legalization increases addiction and destroys society” — and pulls it apart, piece by sloppy piece. Then we’ll look at what actually happens when countries stop criminalizing users and start regulating supply.

The Prohibitionist Claim in One Sentence

The standard claim goes like this:

If drugs are decriminalized or legalized, more people will use them, addiction will skyrocket, crime will soar, and society will unravel. Therefore, we must keep drugs illegal to protect public health and safety.

Sounds serious. The problem? When you compare this rhetoric to actual data from the real world — Portugal, Switzerland, the Netherlands, US cannabis states, supervised consumption sites — the argument falls apart faster than a DARE pamphlet under peer review.

Myth #1: “Legalization Automatically Increases Addiction”

The entire panic hinges on the idea that legal access = mass addiction. Reality is a lot more boring — and a lot more hopeful.

Portugal: Decriminalization Did Not Trigger a Drug Apocalypse

In 2001, Portugal did what prohibitionists swear will end civilization: it decriminalized the personal possession of all drugs — heroin, cocaine, MDMA, you name it. Not “free-for-all legalization,” but a crucial shift from criminal punishment to a health-based response.

Here’s what actually happened in the years after decriminalization (from data published by Portugal’s own health authorities and multiple peer-reviewed analyses):

• Overdose deaths dropped dramatically. By the mid-2010s, Portugal’s drug-related death rate was among the lowest in Western Europe.
• HIV transmission among people who inject drugs plummeted. Needle sharing decreased once people weren’t terrified of arrest for carrying sterile equipment.
• Problematic use did not explode. Lifetime experimentation with drugs rose slightly (which tends to happen as stigma decreases), but there was no surge in heavy, dependent use.
• More people actually sought treatment. When going to a clinic no longer came bundled with police and criminal records, people started asking for help.

If the prohibitionist story were true, Portugal should be a smoking crater of addiction. Instead, it’s one of the most cited success stories in global drug policy reform.

Switzerland: From Open-Air Heroin Scene to Stabilized, Managed Use

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Switzerland had chaotic open drug scenes and high rates of overdose and HIV among heroin users. The country responded with a radical idea: treat heroin dependence as a health issue and regulate it.

They introduced heroin-assisted treatment (HAT) — prescribing pharmaceutical-grade heroin in clinical settings to long-term users who hadn’t responded to other treatments.

The results, documented in extensive evaluations:

• Crime among participants dropped substantially. No need to hustle for street heroin when your dose is medically provided.
• Health improved. Reduced overdose risk, stabilized lives, and better physical and mental health outcomes.
• No explosion of new heroin users. Making heroin available in a strict medical context didn’t entice hordes of curious teenagers.

Again: when supply is regulated and people aren’t hunted by police, outcomes get better, not worse.

Myth #2: “We Tried Being Softer and It Made Things Worse”

Whenever you bring up examples like Portugal or Switzerland, prohibitionists do a quick pivot: “Those are unique; it won’t work here.” Translation: We have no counter-evidence, so we’ll just say we’re special.

US Cannabis Legalization: The Crumbling Scare Narrative

Legal cannabis was supposed to be the gateway to doom: more use, more teen addiction, stoned drivers everywhere, social decay, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

Here’s what the data from multiple US states and Canada has shown so far:

• Adult use increased moderately, not catastrophically. That’s what happens when you normalize a substance that was already widely used.
• Teen use has not consistently increased. In some jurisdictions, it actually stayed flat or declined post-legalization. Regulated stores check ID more reliably than street dealers.
• Arrests plummeted. Fewer people arrested, prosecuted, or getting life warped by a minor possession record. Massive win for civil liberties.
• Medical access expanded. Patients who find relief with cannabis now don’t have to choose between health and criminalization.

Is legalization perfect? No. Corporate capture, aggressive marketing, and inequitable licensing are very real problems. But those are regulatory issues, not an indictment of the basic principle that regulated legal supply is better than cartel-run prohibition.

The Netherlands: Coffeeshops Without Collapse

The Netherlands has allowed regulated sale of cannabis in coffeeshops for decades, surrounded by some of the most hysterical media in Europe constantly predicting disaster.

Yet:

• Overall cannabis use rates are not dramatically higher than many countries that maintain strict prohibition.
• Serious outcomes like overdose, HIV, and problem use are significantly mitigated through harm reduction and pragmatic policy.

The “soft on drugs = chaos” mantra mostly survives as a talking point in press conferences, not in actual epidemiological data.

Myth #3: “Prohibition Protects the Vulnerable”

The most insidious part of the prohibition narrative is the moral cover: “We criminalize to protect vulnerable people.” In reality, prohibition targets the vulnerable and shields the powerful.

Who Actually Gets Punished?

Drug laws are enforced selectively and brutally against:

• Poor communities
• Racialized groups
• People with mental health issues
• Those already marginalized by housing, employment, or immigration status

Cocaine at an elite fundraiser is a quirky anecdote. Crack in a poor neighborhood is a SWAT operation. That’s not “public health”; that’s class and race control dressed up as morality.

Who Actually Gets Protected?

While individuals get criminal records for a few grams, entire industries profit from substances that cause massive harm:

• Alcohol companies run primetime ads glamorizing intoxication.
• Pharmaceutical giants aggressively pushed addictive opioids, then lobbied to limit liability when the bodies piled up.
• Private prisons and law enforcement agencies soak up billions from the drug war economy.

If the state really cared about “addiction” as a neutral health problem, its response to alcohol, tobacco, and prescription opioids would look a lot closer to its response to heroin or cocaine. It doesn’t — because this was never primarily about health. It’s about which drugs, and which users, are politically and economically convenient to punish.

Myth #4: “Criminalization Is Necessary for Public Safety”

The war on drugs has been sold as a giant public safety project. We were promised less crime, fewer overdoses, safer streets. Instead, we got the opposite.

Prohibition Fuels the Very Violence It Claims to Stop

Making a substance illegal doesn’t eliminate demand; it just hands the supply chain to unregulated underground markets. No product testing, no age checks, no quality control — just whoever is most willing to use violence and bribery to dominate distribution.

We’ve seen this story before:

• Alcohol Prohibition in the US (1920s): Bootlegging, organized crime, turf wars, corruption, and toxic moonshine. Violence declined dramatically once alcohol was re-legalized and regulated.
• Modern drug cartels: Billions in revenue from prohibition markets, with violence cascading across borders while politicians pretend the problem is “users,” not the black market they created.

Drug prohibition doesn’t prevent crime; it creates an enormous criminal economy and then uses that chaos as justification for more policing and surveillance.

Criminalization Increases Overdose Risk

When drugs are illegal, people don’t magically stop using. They just use:

• Unregulated, adulterated products (hello, fentanyl-contaminated everything)
• In unsafe, rushed environments (to avoid detection)
• Without the ability to ask questions, check potency, or return bad product

Regulated legal markets, by contrast, can introduce:

• Known and labeled doses
• Testing for contaminants
• Age limits and packaging controls
• Health warnings and access to information

You don’t reduce overdose deaths with handcuffs; you reduce them with stable supply, honest information, and the basic recognition that people will use drugs whether you like it or not.

What Decriminalization and Regulation Actually Offer

Once you strip away the scare tactics, the real comparison is simple:

Option A: Criminalization, unregulated supply, stigma, mistrust, and underground markets.

Option B: Decriminalization or legalization with regulation, health services, quality control, and rights.

Decriminalization: Stop Treating Users as Criminals

Decriminalization doesn’t mean “anything goes.” It means:

• No criminal penalties for personal possession and use.
• Police stop hunting users and focus on real crimes.
• Resources shift from punishment to voluntary health and social services.

Portugal is the flagship example, but similar approaches (in varying forms) have been taken in places like the Czech Republic and parts of Latin America. The common results: more humane outcomes, no apocalypse.

Legalization with Regulation: Take the Market Back from Criminals

Legalization goes further by bringing production and sale out of the shadows:

• Licensed producers instead of clandestine labs.
• Lab-tested products instead of mystery powders.
• Tax revenues for public health instead of profits for cartels or gangs.
• Opportunities to design policy that actually addresses risks, instead of just pretending drugs will vanish if we yell at them hard enough.

We already do this for alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, and even caffeine. Yes, we could (and should) regulate many of those more strictly. But the principle is clear: regulation is how you manage risk in a reality-based society.

“But Won’t Normalization Make Drugs ‘Too Accepted’?”

A favorite fallback argument is that by normalizing drug use, we’ll send a message that it’s harmless.

Here’s the thing: prohibition doesn’t just exaggerate risk; it lies about it. When young people realize they were lied to about low-risk use, they’re more likely to dismiss legitimate warnings about high-risk behaviors. Scare campaigns backfire.

Honest, evidence-based education — paired with access to safer supply and non-punitive support — is far more credible than “do this once and your life is over” nonsense. Adults deserve nuance, not propaganda.

Harm Reduction: The Evidence the Drug War Ignores

If prohibition worked, you wouldn’t see harm reduction initiatives quietly cleaning up its mess.

Examples with strong evidence behind them:

• Supervised consumption sites: Overdose reversals, no recorded deaths on site, reduced public injecting and syringe litter, more people accessing services.
• Needle and syringe programs: Major reductions in HIV and hepatitis C transmission among people who inject drugs.
• Drug checking services: Users adjust behavior (use less, discard, avoid mixing) when they know what’s actually in their drugs.
• Opioid agonist therapies (e.g., methadone, buprenorphine): Reduced overdose, reduced criminal activity, stabilized lives.

All of these treat drug use as a fact of life and focus on reducing harm, not on forcing abstinence at gunpoint. None of them require criminalization. In fact, criminalization actively undermines their reach and effectiveness.

The Core Issue: Bodily Autonomy and Adult Choice

Beneath the data and policy models sits a basic principle: adults own their bodies. The state does not.

We tolerate — and even celebrate — all kinds of risky behaviors:

• Extreme sports
• Alcohol and tobacco use
• Workaholism and chronic sleep deprivation
• Ultra-processed diets that wreck long-term health

Yet we’re told that certain molecules, when ingested without government blessing, justify arrest, incarceration, family separation, and lifelong stigma.

This isn’t about safety. It’s about control.

So What Should a Rational Drug Policy Look Like?

If we stop clinging to the fantasy that prohibition works, a sane framework emerges:

• Decriminalize personal possession and use of all drugs. No more criminal records for what adults put in their own bodies.
• Regulate production and supply with different models suited to different substances (medical-only, licensed retail, social clubs, etc.).
• Fund harm reduction and voluntary treatment at scale — supervised consumption, drug checking, substitution therapies, mental health support.
• Expunge past convictions for non-violent drug offenses and compensate communities most harmed by the drug war.
• Keep regulation out of corporate capture by prioritizing community-based, non-profit, or cooperative supply models where possible.

This isn’t utopian. It’s already happening, in fragments, around the world. Everywhere we move away from criminalization and toward regulation and health, outcomes improve. Not perfectly, not overnight, but measurably.

Conclusion: The Real Risk Is Sticking with a Failed System

The claim that “legalization will increase addiction and destroy society” sounds serious until you actually look at the evidence. Then it looks like what it is: a lazy, fear-driven defense of a disastrous status quo.

Prohibition hasn’t eliminated drugs. It has:

• Filled prisons
• Supercharged black markets
• Turned manageable risks into lethal ones
• Crushed civil liberties in the name of “safety”

Decriminalization and regulated supply aren’t reckless experiments. The reckless experiment was criminalizing hundreds of millions of people and hoping fear would outperform basic human behavior and market dynamics.

The verdict is in: it didn’t. It’s time to grow up as a society, accept that drugs exist, and build policy around reality, not fantasy. Let informed adults make their own choices, and use the power of the state not to police those choices, but to ensure that when people do use drugs, they’re far less likely to die, be poisoned, or be thrown into a cage for it.

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