Why drugs stay illegal: the business nobody wants to shut down

Why drugs stay illegal: the business nobody wants to shut down

Two Civil Guard officers killed in Barbate. That is the price the discussion puts on the table whenever someone asks why hierba, cocaine or fentanyl remain illegal in Spain. The official answer talks about public health. The answer gaining ground in economic analyses is a different one: there is a business worth billions that, if legalized, would change hands. The starting point is blunt: prohibition protects no one, it only guarantees that the margin is shared among those who already control the chain.

From there, the issue opens up on three fronts that do not always align: health, fiscal and geopolitical. And on all three, the numbers being handled contradict the reassuring narrative.

What happens when alcohol is banned: the Prohibition lesson

The most repeated parallel is American Prohibition. During the years of the ban, Al Capone built an empire on illegal alcohol, the streets of Chicago stopped being safe, and people ended up drinking dubious spirits that left consumers blind. Cocktails and mixed drinks, according to this reading, were born as a way to mask the taste of rotgut. Prohibition did not eliminate consumption: it made it more expensive, adulterated it and put it in the hands of mafias.

The extrapolation is direct. If it worked that way with alcohol, the mechanism is identical with cocaine or heroin. The argument that keeps coming up is that the problem is not the drug, but its prohibition. And the corollary: whoever profits from prohibition has an active incentive to make sure nothing changes.

Fentanyl and opium: when legality kills too

The strongest objection to the legalization thesis comes from the United States. There, fentanyl is not sold over the counter, but oxycodone and vicodin were generously prescribed to patients in pain, and the result was an addiction epidemic now counted among the country's biggest health crises. The conclusion drawn: if control is destroyed, society is destroyed with it.

The historical precedent cited is opium in eighteenth-century China, when the British introduced it on a massive scale and opium dens proliferated. The population, the argument goes, stopped working in order to get high. It is the same pattern attributed to areas with a heavy drug-trafficking presence: young people want to be traficante and rich, not salaried self-employed workers.

Who keeps the margin: the 50-70% that never reaches the traficante

Here the issue becomes uncomfortable. Some argue the business is not exclusive to the narcos, and the range handled by some researchers puts between 50% and 70% of the value added in hands that do not belong to the speedboat trafficker. The question posed is direct: if billions come in through southern Spain, is it really believed that the guy crossing the Strait controls all of it?

The thesis gaining weight is that the Western financial system rests, in part, on that extraction. The margins are enormous, they are shared among a few, and the police and judicial apparatus acts as a coercive force against the competition. The state, in this reading, would be the best-organized mafia: it does not compete with the traficante, it monopolizes it.

The Portuguese case and the counterexample of unchecked consumption

Portugal decriminalized hierba use and, it is argued, is today a more balanced society. The sector would generate legal crops, regulated trade, taxes and social security contributions. Much of the marijuana consumed in Spain is already produced here, in illegal grow operations with hooked-up power. Legalization would turn many of those producers into self-employed workers with declared activity.

The counterargument is that you cannot legalize in a society of permanent consumption, where advertising bombardment pushes people to consume more. In the United States, it is said, legal marijuana led to varieties with extremely high THC percentages and a rise in schizophrenia cases associated with its use. The conclusion drawn: the substance is not the problem, the environment around it is.

The cost of keeping prohibition

Spending on police, judicial resources and operations against drug trafficking is the line item that never appears on prohibition's debit side. The argument is that this money comes from fleecing the working classes to sustain a first-world fiction. And that, meanwhile, elite anti-drug-trafficking units are shut down for lack of budget while other line items are expanded.

The question left hanging is the one from the opening message: how long will this lie continue. The answer economic analysis gives is that as long as the margin is greater in illegality than in legality, no one with the power to change it will have any interest in doing so. And for now, the math does not add up for the taxpayer.