Let’s not forget how the war on drugs was also am excuse to discriminate without being as obvious about it, since weed was disproportionately used by mexican and black communities(? The details are a bit hazy to me, truth be told).

And since capitalism needs its blood sacrifice, and our constitution explicitly states that slave labor is still allowed for imprisoned people, we now have a permanent underclass of drug possessors to extract slave labor from. Not to mention that since we don’t have any robust ways to rehabilitate former criminals into society, and most jobs categorically deny the applications of anyone who has had a felony on their record, it just funnels these people back into the industrial prison complex. I mean what else are you supposed to do when you have no money and nobody will hire you?

Capitalism is working as intended and the criminalization of drugs is just one of those levers it can pull. It was never about the actual harmfulness of drugs, and that’s why problems like this have never been fixed.