The Prohibition We Refuse to See

The United States tried alcohol prohibition for thirteen years. Consumption did fall — but at a cost so catastrophic and so disproportionate to the benefit that the country repealed the Eighteenth Amendment within barely more than a decade. Prohibition handed enormous wealth and power to organised crime, corrupted law enforcement and the judiciary, filled prisons with people whose only offence was a voluntary transaction, and killed citizens who drank adulterated bootleg liquor — some of it poisoned because the federal government had mandated the denaturing of industrial alcohol. The reduction in drinking was real. The price was unconscionable. The country recognised this and acted.

Drug prohibition has now lasted the better part of a century, and every one of those mechanisms is operating at full force. The black market is global. Organised crime controls a revenue stream worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Law enforcement in producer and transit countries is corrupted beyond recognition. In the United States, drug offences are a major driver of incarceration, particularly at the federal level, locking up people whose offence was a transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller. Users die — not only from the pharmacology of what they take, but from adulterated supply chains, fentanyl-contaminated product, and infections contracted through shared needles — harms that exist because the market is unregulated and users are driven underground. The machinery of harm is identical to that of alcohol prohibition. The refusal to recognise it is breathtaking.

Criminal law should require a victim. That is not a technicality; it is foundational. Where there is a willing buyer and a willing seller, conducting a transaction that affects no one else, there is no victim. The phrase "victimless crime" is not a category — it is a contradiction in terms. To criminalise a voluntary exchange between consenting adults is to use the machinery of law enforcement for something other than its purpose. It is the imposition of a moral preference, dressed up as public safety.

And moral preference is precisely what it is. There is no universal ethical principle that says an adult must not ingest a substance of their choosing. There are ethical principles about harm, about responsibility, about what one owes others. None of them require prohibition. What they require is that the person who uses a substance bears the consequences of that choice, and that harms to others — driving under the influence, neglect of dependants, violence — are dealt with as the separate offences they are. We already do this with alcohol. We do not ban alcohol because some people drive drunk. We ban drunk driving. The principle applies to every other substance. The regulatory regime will differ — no one proposes identical rules for cannabis and fentanyl — but the principle is the same, and the refusal to apply it is not principled. It is incoherent.

The strongest objection is this: some drugs are so addictive that legalisation would unleash a wave of addiction society cannot absorb. The objection deserves a serious answer.

Start with what we know. Portugal decriminalised the possession of all drugs in 2001. Drug use did not explode. Overdose deaths fell dramatically. HIV infections among drug users collapsed. People who needed treatment sought it because they were no longer afraid of arrest. Portugal did not legalise commercial sale — it kept supply illegal — so it does not directly test a regulated market. But it demolishes the claim that removing criminal penalties from users leads to catastrophe. Meanwhile, the United States pursued the most aggressive drug enforcement in the developed world and produced the opioid epidemic, the deadliest drug crisis in its history. The first wave was driven not by prohibition but by legally prescribed OxyContin, aggressively marketed by a pharmaceutical industry operating within a captured regulatory framework. Prohibition then drove users from diverted prescription pills into heroin and illicit fentanyl, multiplying the death toll. The lesson is stark: neither an unregulated legal market nor criminal prohibition prevented mass addiction. Both made it worse, through different mechanisms.

What would work is what we already do with alcohol and tobacco, adapted to the pharmacology of each substance: state-controlled or tightly licensed supply, mandated purity and dosage labelling, no advertising, plain packaging, taxation calibrated to fund treatment and internalise health costs, supervised consumption sites, and heroin-assisted treatment programmes — which already operate in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Canada with strong evidence of reduced mortality and crime. Legalisation does not have to mean a commercial free-for-all. It must not. The point is not to create another profit-seeking industry engineered to monetise addiction. The point is to take the market away from cartels, ensure that what people consume is what they think they are consuming, and treat addiction as the health condition it is rather than the crime it is not.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and drug prohibition is one of the widest, best-paved stretches of that road in modern history. It has filled prisons, destroyed communities, empowered cartels, killed users who might have lived, and prevented the sick from seeking help — all in the name of protecting people from themselves. The evidence for its failure is not ambiguous. It is overwhelming. We saw the same evidence with alcohol prohibition and acted on it within thirteen years. That we have refused to act on the same evidence for drugs, decade after decade, is not caution. It is the deep human tendency to embrace what is comfortable and reject what is true. The laws should be repealed, globally, and replaced with regulation, taxation, and treatment. Every year of delay is measured in lives.