A Thesis That Inverts Common Sense
Few authors in Spanish have discussed drug policy with the bite of Antonio Escohotado. His starting argument is deliberately provocative: before asking what substances do, we should ask what the law does to them. History offers a natural testing ground, because the same drug has been at once legal, illegal, or indifferent to the law depending on the time and place, and those changes in status left their mark on how it was produced and consumed.
Against that background, Escohotado sorts the reasons for prohibition into two large blocks and subjects each to criticism in turn. The first appeals to the properties of the substances; the second, to the prestige of those who defend prohibition. We review both.
The “Objective” Argument: Substances as the Culprits
The first pillar holds that certain substances by themselves cause moral and intellectual stupefaction and that, for this reason, they deserve the name narcotics. Escohotado distinguishes an old version from a modern one.
The old one singled out a handful of specific compounds—opium, morphine, cocaine—as a blessing in the hands of doctors and scientists and a curse in anyone else’s. The 1961 Single Convention extended that list, though it remained tiny compared with the universe of existing psychoactive substances. In practice, while pharmacies could supply products as active as the controlled ones or more so, the regime coexisted with a small black market and a thriving “white” market in amphetamines, barbiturates, synthetic opioids, meprobamate, and benzodiazepines.
That version fell into crisis when toxicologists failed to give a biological, neurological, or psychological definition of what made one substance a “narcotic” and not another; the WHO’s own Expert Committee ended up deeming the concept unscientific. In that vacuum the modern version crystallized: the criterion stopped being pharmacological and became ethical and legal, embodied in a system of schedules. Laws no longer needed to explain why alcohol or barbiturates were food or medicine while cocaine or marijuana were crimes. To settle that arbitrariness a broader category appeared, that of the psychotropic: the State claimed guardianship over anything that acted on its citizens’ nervous systems.
Four Objections to the Objective Argument
Escohotado answers this block with several rebuttals. First: it clashes with the scientific idea of a drug, which treats chemical compounds as neutral in themselves, beneficial or harmful depending on use and context, not as carriers of an intrinsic morality.
Second: the reasoning is circular. First it was said these substances were extremely useful in competent hands, but it was made difficult for those competent hands to use them; when doctors and researchers demanded access, the answer was that they were useless because better synthetics already existed; and when someone asks for technical proof of that superiority, we are back at the starting point. Since there is no way to prove they are useless, they are called dangerous, and since the danger does not hold up before a toxicologist, they are again called useless.
Third: a drug is not just a molecule but also an ideological label and a set of conditions of access. Escohotado recalls the profile of the opiate user in the United States: in the early twentieth century they were mostly older people integrated into family and working life; decades later, after prohibition, the majority profile had shifted to marginalized young people associated with crime. Did opium change, or did the way of getting it? The same question applies to overdoses or to the appearance of cheaper, more toxic substitutes. Hence his most quoted line: the sociological reality of drugs is a consequence, not a premise, of their legal status. When that effect is ignored, he warns, everything is left at the mercy of self-fulfilling prophecies.
Fourth: it is untenable to call the user of illicit substances a “drug addict” and the user of licit ones a “drinker” or “smoker.” That incoherence, he argues, serves to maintain a double standard on a planetary scale: persecution of crops in the Global South on one hand, and mass sales of tobacco, alcohol, and patented psychiatric drugs—often without health warnings—in those same territories on the other.
The Argument “From Authority”: Who Defends It
The second pillar does not appeal to the substances but to the weight of those who condemn drugs: a group of eminent figures and a great mass of anonymous citizens. The implicit idea is that so many respected leaders and so many ordinary people cannot all be wrong at once. Escohotado recalls that prohibitionism, above all of alcohol, was born backed by religious fundamentalism and was later championed by police, political, and financial institutions, with a roster of defenders running from Anslinger to a long list of heads of state.
As for the “man in the street,” he acknowledges that supporters of prohibition probably outnumber its opponents, though he qualifies that rigorous polls have never been taken on this specific point and that having tried an illicit substance—something that in some countries exceeds a quarter of the population—is not the same as opposing prohibition.
Two Objections to the Argument From Authority
Against this, Escohotado raises two points. One: political authority is not the only kind. If rulers back prohibition almost unanimously, a good part of intellectual authority—in the sciences and the arts—has rejected it with equal unanimity. There are, then, two competing prestiges, and he lines up on the second side of the scale a genealogy running from Theophrastus and Galen to Huxley or Freud, comparing it to the old confrontation between humanists and inquisitors over witchcraft.
Two: the citizen lacks reliable data and lives bombarded by clichés such as the “narcotic spiral,” according to which merely approaching a prohibited drug is enough to fall into addiction and crime. Escohotado sets against this figures that, in his view, paint a very different picture: a minuscule proportion of those who try these substances end up needing medical attention, while the vast majority use them occasionally and without incidents that reach the statistics. His conclusion is that the media almost always portray the problematic fragment and almost never the majority, leaving the public without real elements of judgment about the advantages or disadvantages of current policy.
A Critical Reading
Escohotado’s text is a classic of anti-prohibitionist thought in Spanish and retains its polemical force. Still, it should be read with caution when it comes to the data. The figures he uses on proportions of harm, overdoses, or the “spiral of addiction” come from an essay of the 1980s and 1990s, with methodologies and sources he does not always detail; some are an author’s estimates rather than verifiable epidemiological results, and they should not be taken as exact measures of the risk of any substance.
His central thesis—that the legal framework shapes a good part of the harms associated with drugs—is today widely debated in the public policy literature, but that does not cancel out real pharmacological risks. That a harm is a consequence of prohibition (adulteration, unknown doses, criminalization) does not mean the substance is harmless. Opioids, cocaine, and synthetic stimulants carry serious risks of dependence, overdose, and interactions, with or without prohibition. The critique of the double standard and of media demonization is reasonable; turning it into a minimization of danger is not.
In line with Psiconáutica’s editorial approach, this article is of interest as a document in the history of ideas and as an invitation to think about drug policy with data and without Manichaeism, not as a guide to use. Any personal decision in this area should rest on up-to-date health information, on harm reduction principles, and, for any problematic use, on professional care.
