The War on Drugs

25 years ago, Portugal had an opioid epidemic.

Instead of an ineffective, costly, cruel war on drug users, they treated addiction as an illness.

Selling heroin stayed illegal. Owning a small amount for personal use didn't.

Instead of hunting addicts down and punishing them — prison, forcing them into hiding, criminalizing them — they told people: ok, we see you have a problem, we want to help. Come get medical services.

Clean needles if needed. Safe spaces to inject if needed. Psychological support. Methadone to manage withdrawal.

Addicts weren't threatened into stopping. They were helped. Given options.

It didn't fix everything overnight — not every addict was ready to quit. But every time one was ready, the help was there. And the ones who weren't ready yet got to watch their friends get better.

It worked. Overdoses down. HIV cases down. People locked up for drug possession, down. Money spent on enforcement, down. The dealers who were getting rich off heroin lost their customers.

Portugal sees a few dozen overdose deaths a year. The US sees 70,000–80,000. The US has 30 times Portugal's population — and somewhere around a thousand to two thousand times the overdose deaths.

The US approach — "I'll lock you up with people doing hard time for years, that'll teach you a lesson" — works exceptionally badly. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet, and among the highest drug death rates too. Also among the highest homicide rates in the wealthy world — some states run 10x what you'd see in Europe.

Not much has changed. The war on drug users is a bad idea. You can't solve a problem by criminalizing the symptom. Reality has disproven that.

Some people genuinely believe the war on drugs can work. But plenty of the people pushing it already know it doesn't reduce drug use. That's not actually what they care about.

Some have said outright that it functioned as a way to go after political opponents — criminalize people, and it disrupts their communities, vilifies them, keeps the cycle going.

Nearly 2 million people are behind bars in the US. The 13th Amendment still allows forced labor for anyone convicted of a crime, and private companies profit from it.

Get a felony — for something like drug possession, or falling behind on court debt — and in a lot of states you can lose your right to vote too. Nobody tracks the full national number. Millions of people, disproportionately Black men.

Cocaine used by someone in finance gets treated leniently. Crack, more common in poor Black neighborhoods, gets you years. Police don't do stop-and-frisk on executives who are high all day. They target poor neighborhoods — drug charges are just a convenient excuse to harass people.

That it destroys communities isn't a side effect. For a lot of people behind this, it's the point.

A lot of people are happy to spend unlimited money on incarceration and enforcement, but not on healthcare — because the people who'd benefit are poor and mostly minorities. It's the same instinct behind ICE detention and migrant camps: money appears fast when the goal is locking people up, not helping them.

One senator has openly said the US has an "under-incarceration problem." He represents a Southern state whose prison system grew directly out of the plantation economy — forced labor included.

Calling it a war on drugs is a bit dishonest. It's closer to a war on Black men.

Meanwhile — a veteran can sleep on the street and there's no money to help. Get charged with something nonviolent, like drug possession or an unpaid debt, and suddenly the state can find $50,000–$100,000 a year to keep you locked up.

Stay a struggling, law-abiding citizen: $0 in support. Get convicted of something nonviolent: six figures a year, spent on you — just not to help you.

If that much money can be found every year to "teach people a lesson," why does anyone need to go into debt for college?

It's a rigged system. Not really designed to solve the problems it claims to solve — designed to sustain them, and to keep a specific group of people down while doing it. Prohibition 2.0, aimed at whoever's convenient this time.