The Differential Legalization of Pleasure

Alcohol kills hundreds of thousands of people a year in wealthy countries and is sold in supermarkets. Cannabis has a lower harm profile than alcohol by most measures and was, for most of the twentieth century, a criminal offense whose consequences fell almost entirely on Black and Latino communities in the US, immigrant communities in the UK, and poor communities everywhere. The pattern of what gets legalized, when, and for whom tracks political economy, racial hierarchy, and commercial interest far more reliably than it tracks harm.

Prohibition in the United States, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, showed what happens when moralized legislation collides with entrenched demand. The Eighteenth Amendment was not passed because most Americans had stopped drinking. It was passed because a well-organized coalition of Protestant reformers, rural legislators, and industrial employers who wanted sober workers successfully framed alcohol as a threat to the family and the nation. What Prohibition produced instead of temperance was organized crime and widespread contempt for law enforcement. Its repeal in 1933 was not a moral reversal but a political calculation: the Depression had made tax revenue from alcohol too valuable to forgo, and the violence the policy had created had become a political liability to both parties.

Cannabis criminalization followed a different path. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, built his case against cannabis in the 1930s on claims that the drug caused Mexican immigrants and Black jazz musicians to become violent and sexually uninhibited. The testimonies he collected, the newspaper coverage he cultivated, and the congressional hearings he staged all drew on racial anxiety as their primary warrant. Enforcement fell overwhelmingly on Black and Latino communities regardless of actual use rates. By the time legalization began spreading through US states after 2012, the people most likely to have criminal records for cannabis were the least likely to benefit from the new legal market.

Portugal’s 2001 decision to decriminalize personal possession of all drugs provides the closest thing to a controlled experiment that drug policy offers. The decision did not legalize drugs or end criminal penalties for trafficking; it redirected people caught with small quantities to health panels rather than criminal courts, and paired decriminalization with expanded investment in treatment and harm reduction. In the decade that followed, drug-related HIV transmission fell sharply, overdose deaths declined, and drug use rates did not increase relative to comparable European countries. Most observers had confidently predicted the opposite; few have admitted they were wrong.

The opioid epidemic in the United States and Canada shows that what gets treated as a health problem and what gets treated as a crime is determined by politics, not pharmacology. Pharmaceutical manufacturers aggressively marketed OxyContin to physicians while misrepresenting how addictive it was. When the crisis could no longer be ignored, it was dealth with as a public health emergency. Federal money flowed toward treatment; harm reduction was debated seriously in legislatures that had previously dismissed it, largely because the communities most affected were predominantly white and rural. This was not the policy response extended to crack cocaine in the 1980s, which devastated predominantly Black urban communities and was met with mandatory minimums and mass incarceration.

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Hari2015

Johann Hari: Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Bloomsbury, 2015, 978-1620408926.

Keefe2021

Patrick Radden Keefe: Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. Doubleday, 2021, 978-0385545686.

Nutt2012

David Nutt: Drugs Without the Hot Air: Making Sense of the Drug Debate. Bloomsbury, 2012, 978-1906860165.