At least, not really. You can drink all the fancy cocktails you want without breaking the law, of course, as long as you’re of age. Bootlegging is no longer an issue. The Italian mafia barely exists, these days. Tobacco’s easy to get and use. Some employers allow their employees to take cigarette breaks throughout the day. Yet these aren’t the only drugs in the world. Their merely the ones most associated with normal, “respectable” (that is, white and middle class and probably vaguely protestant) persons. You know, accountants and such. Bores. People Nixon didn’t want to arrest. Unlike hippies and the poor and people of color or anyone too different, their stereotypical drugs of choice are now perfectly legal. From their narrow little suburban perspective, prohibition has ended. Hoo-bloody-ray! Those vile, loathsome, self-righteous wine-drinking fiends… telling themselves that only the most dangerous, life-ruining drugs (like marijuana, a plant they no doubt assume is incredibly poisonous, because they’re small-minded and pathetically uninformed) are illegal.

This modern form of prohibition doesn’t get in the way of the normies, the suburb-dwelling, surveillance-loving dunces. So, they forget it exists. They start assume that prohibiting other drugs is normal and right. “Heroin and cocaine and LSD and acid destroy lives and compel the homeless to dress unfashionably,” they say to themselves, “It’s a good thing they’re illegal, huh? Better keep things that way, eh?”. Decades of tacky, falsehood-filled War On Drugs propaganda has convinced these suit-wearing loons that things ought to stay that way. They know nothing of the dangers of the black market (something that legalization and regulation of all drugs could easily eliminate). To them, illegal drugs are nothing like the craft beers and bubbly wines they eagerly slurp. They’ll never understand why anyone in the whole wide world might decide to try any of them. Comfortable and content, they forget how exceedingly sucky alcohol prohibition was… and lose also sympathy for the countless innocents affected by moronic drug policies. They fail to understand the hardships faced by those who enjoy so-called hard drugs… or even soft ones that happen to be illegal, for awfully stupid and grotesquely racist reasons.

In a world ruled by reasonable people, prohibition of any kind wouldn’t exist. Allowing the alcohol industry to flourish while banning less-dangerous substances (from psychedelics to opioids) seems awfully illogical. It only makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of a racist, hippie-hating asshole. By banning drugs associated with minorities* and others considered undesirable, you can arrest them without looking bad. Yet this isn’t right. In fact, it’s incredibly harmful and loathsome and hideous and wrong in too many ways to count.

From the perspective of actual human beings with at least some amount of decency and/or empathy, the War on Drugs is both immoral and dangerous. It’s a problem that must be fixed, a danger to civilization, and excuse to treat humans like trash because of what they decide to do with their own bodies. Banning the use of a popular drug helps organized crime, too, by giving criminals a perpetually-profitable source of revenue. It hurts far more than it helps. We know this. It’s fucking obvious. So, we need to stop. Now. Locking people up for enjoying the wrong substances or accidentally developing addictions isn’t right. Banning the sale of something popular and fun will merely push the marketplace underground. Only a monster — or a brainless suburbanite lulled into complacency by endless propaganda — would allow such a thing to happen. Prohibition needs to end. And properly, this time. Legalizing alcohol wasn’t enough.

*Most illegal drugs were historically associated with an ethic group that scared white people. For example, opium and heroin were seen as a Chinese thing. Even alcohol was sort of a Catholic drug (and “those darned papists”, such as my ancestors, were thought to incapable of loyalty to anyone save for the Pope/Vatican, which made them Un-American or whatever in the eyes of idiots). Of course, Catholics and Italians and Irish people are now perceived as “white”, so “their” drug (alcohol) isn’t as feared… yet other drugs still are, of course, because American is way more racist and nasty than it wants to admit.