Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Prohibition’ operates across two registers that are rarely permitted to speak to each other. In its psychoanalytic register — visible in Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Abraham’s clinical papers — prohibition functions as the psychic mechanism by which taboo is internalized: the cultural interdiction that mirrors obsessional neurosis, generating compulsive ceremonial in its wake. Here prohibition is not merely a social policy but a structure of the unconscious, homologous to repression itself. In its socio-political register — dominant in Hari’s Chasing the Scream and Alexander’s Globalisation of Addiction — prohibition designates the twentieth-century regime of drug criminalization and is subjected to sustained empirical and ethical critique. Hari argues that prohibition obeys an ‘iron law’ that narrows markets toward ever-more-potent substances, summons criminal enterprises into existence, and produces the very harms it claims to prevent. Alexander frames the prohibition-versus-legalization binary as a false dichotomy, insisting that neither pole can materially address addiction because addiction is fundamentally a problem of social dislocation rather than pharmacology. The tension between these two registers — prohibition as psychic structure and prohibition as failed policy — is the productive fault-line the concordance must hold open.
Prohibition always narrows the market to the most potent possible substance. It’s the iron law.
Hari advances the ‘iron law’ thesis: by eliminating mild intoxicants, prohibition drives users toward extreme substances, producing worse outcomes than an open market would.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015thesis
The policy of prohibition summoned these characters into existence, b[ut every time he is killed, a harder and more vicious version of him emerges to fill the space provided by prohibition for a global criminal industry].
Hari argues that prohibition does not suppress criminal enterprise but generates it through Darwinian selection, each iteration more violent than the last.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015thesis
the prohibition versus legalisation conflict was characterised in Chapter 3 of this book as a false dichotomy… neither can have much effect on the addiction problem.
Alexander contends that framing addiction policy as a choice between prohibition and legalization is intellectually false, because addiction is rooted in dislocation rather than drug availability.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008thesis
Harry Anslinger himself wrote in the 1960s: ‘Prohibition, conceived as a moral attempt to improve the American way of life, would ultimately cast the nation int[o chaos].’
Hari invokes Anslinger’s own retrospective admission that prohibition’s moral ambitions produced social disorder, turning the architect of drug criminalization against his own project.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015thesis
The murder rate fell dramatically, and it didn’t rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and ’80s.
Hari draws a direct causal link between the intensity of drug prohibition and rates of lethal violence, using the post-repeal alcohol era as historical evidence.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015thesis
Obsessional prohibitions involve just as extensive renunciations and restrictions in the lives of those who are subject to them as do taboo prohibitions.
Freud establishes the structural homology between obsessional neurosis and cultural taboo, framing prohibition as a psychic mechanism operative in both individual pathology and collective ritual.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis
Many people passionately believe that prohibiting drugs helps to control the problems of addiction, whereas others believe, just as [passionately, that legalisation is long overdue].
Alexander maps the ideological landscape of the prohibition debate as a false dichotomy obscuring deeper structural causes of addiction.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
This was the old Department of Prohibition, but prohibition had been abolished and his men needed a new role, fast.
Hari traces the institutional origins of drug prohibition to the bureaucratic redundancy created by the end of alcohol prohibition, revealing it as an administrative artifact rather than a moral necessity.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
During alcohol prohibition, fewer people drank—and fewer died of alcoholism and the diseases it causes. This weighs really heavily on me.
Hari honestly weighs the epidemiological case for prohibition — reduced consumption during alcohol prohibition — before ultimately rejecting it in light of Portugal’s decriminalization evidence.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
John Marks… uses the image of ‘the natural selection of gangsters’ and calls it ‘the Darwinian effect of prohibition.’
Hari cites John Marks’s formulation of the ‘Darwinian effect of prohibition’ as independent corroboration of his own thesis that criminalization selects for increasingly violent criminal actors.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
Perhaps different localities would gradually establish a patchwork of local traditions of tolerance or prohibition, and people with strong feelings on the issue could gravitate to communities with marijuana laws that suited them.
Alexander proposes local-option governance as a pragmatic middle path between uniform federal prohibition and full legalization, grounding policy in community self-determination.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
It’s hard to sit with a complex problem, such as the human urge to get intoxicated, and accept that it will always be with us… It is much more appealing to be told a different message—that it can be ended.
Hari locates the psychological appeal of prohibition in the fantasy of eradicating an irreducible human drive, connecting drug policy to the broader psychodynamics of magical thinking.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
the prohibition against images immediately follows the commandment to recognize only one god, i.e. the commandment designed to eliminate all hesitation (doubt) between the father and the mother.
Abraham situates biblical prohibition within a psychoanalytic reading of the Decalogue, linking the prohibition against graven images to the resolution of parental ambivalence — prohibition as theologically encoded defense.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
religious prohibitions against inquiring into the most secret things.
Abraham identifies cultural and religious prohibitions on epistemophilia as expressions of the same dynamic he observes clinically, linking institutional prohibition to the suppression of scopophilic drives.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
One thing has the potential—more than any other—to kill this attempt at healing. It is the drug war.
Hari argues that the prohibition apparatus — criminal prosecution, stigma, unemployability — actively dismantles the social reconnection that is the only genuine antidote to addiction.
, Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction, 2015supporting
What the ear likes to hear is music, and prohibition of the hearing of music is called obstruction to th[e natural].
Campbell, citing Taoist sources, frames prohibition of natural desire as obstruction of spontaneous self-so-ness, offering a philosophical counterweight to institutionalized interdiction.
, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962aside
a man would not even follow his mother-in-law along the beach until the rising tide had washed her foot-prints from the sand.
Freud documents the extreme behavioral elaboration produced by avoidance prohibitions in non-Western societies, illustrating how taboo generates compulsive ritual observance.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913aside