How America inherited the Nazi war on drugs — and why it’s time to resist
The dark origins of the drug war reveal the need for respectful non-compliance with failed international treaties
Few policies have reshaped the modern world as insidiously as America’s prohibitionist drug agenda. Long sold as a moral crusade against addiction and decay, its roots tell a darker story — one tracing back to Nazi Germany.
Norman Ohler’s Tripped (Buy now: Affiliate link) unearths the unsettling reality of how the United States co-opted, refined, and then exported a prohibitionist drug policy inspired by fascist ideology, weaponising it through international treaties and conventions to enforce a system of global control.
The Nazi blueprint for drug prohibition
Nazi Germany held conflicting stances on drug use. On one hand, the regime promoted a vision of racial purity and discipline, denouncing intoxication as degeneracy. On the other, Pervitin (methamphetamine) fuelled the German war machine, with soldiers relying on it to sustain blitzkrieg offensives. But as the war dragged on, Hitler’s inner circle turned increasingly against drug use, framing it as a Jewish-Bolshevik plot to weaken the Aryan race.
As Ohler details, Heinrich Himmler’s SS sought to eradicate people who use drugs, equating them with the mentally ill and other so-called undesirables marked for extermination. This ideological zeal to criminalise substance use as a moral failing demanding punishment became a cornerstone of post-war prohibitionist thinking.
America’s adoption of the Nazi drug model
The United States, already engaged in early drug prohibition efforts through the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 and the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, absorbed many of the Nazi-era approaches to drug criminalisation. The immediate post-war period saw American policymakers, particularly within the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under Harry Anslinger, intensify the rhetoric that drug use was an existential threat to the nation.
The racist and prohibitionist Anslinger built upon the Nazi framework, recasting people who use drugs as criminals and threats to the social order. His campaigns against cannabis and heroin use leaned on fear-mongering and racial scapegoating, using black and immigrant communities as convenient targets. As Ohler highlights, the language of drug policy shifted from one of regulation to outright eradication, mirroring the totalitarian ethos of the Third Reich.
Exporting prohibition: The UN conventions and international treaties
With America emerging as the dominant power after World War II, it wielded its influence to spread the prohibitionist model globally. The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and 1988 Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances formed the backbone of international drug policy, imposing the American punitive approach onto other nations.
These treaties effectively criminalised entire classes of substances, forcing signatories to enforce stringent drug laws under threat of diplomatic and economic repercussions. The resulting worldwide war on drugs mirrored America’s domestic policies: mass incarceration, militarised policing, and the suppression of indigenous and traditional medicinal practices. The fingerprints of the Nazi model — moral absolutism, racial bias, and an obsession with control — were now enshrined in international law.
The human cost of prohibition
The consequences of this exported prohibitionist doctrine have been catastrophic. Around the world, millions of people have been imprisoned for non-violent drug offences, their lives destroyed and families torn apart.
Prohibition has created the very problems it claims to solve in three key ways:
- Criminals profit from prohibition. Criminalisation both artificially inflates the price of drugs and allows their sale to avoid tax. Black markets fund violent cartels and insurgencies that have devastated entire communities, particularly in the Global South.
- Prohibition makes drugs deadlier. Prohibition places the regulation of drugs in the hands of criminals. The resulting lack of government and pharmaceutical industry regulation leads to the toxic and dangerously potent substances that have caused millions to die form otherwise preventable overdose and toxicity.
- Prohibition delays help seeking. Treating drug use as a crime actively prevents people from accessing the help they need and limits our ability to treat drug harms and addiction.
The need for respectful non-compliance
A growing number of countries are recognising the failures of prohibition and moving towards models of decriminalisation, harm reduction and legal regulation. Portugal’s decriminalisation and Canada’s legal cannabis market, among many other examples, signal a shift away from the failed American (and Nazi) model.
Due to the binding nature of the UN drug conventions, outright defiance remains politically fraught. Instead, nations seeking to break free from America’s prohibitionist legacy must engage in respectful non-compliance — a strategy that involves selectively ignoring or reinterpreting treaty obligations while prioritising domestic policies that promote public health and human rights. Uruguay, for instance, navigated around international restrictions when it became the first country to legalise cannabis.
A future beyond prohibition
Americans built on the ideological foundations of Nazi Germany to impose nearly a century of unnecessary harm on the world. The international treaties that sustain drug prohibition are rooted in authoritarian control, racial discrimination, and human suffering. It is time to reject the punitive Nazi model America exported to the world, and embrace evidence-based drug policies grounded by science and compassion.
The fight for drug reform is ultimately a fight for freedom — the freedom to choose, to heal, and to be free from a legacy of oppression disguised as morality. Recognising this is how we begin to build a more just and humane world.
Jonathan Meddings is an author and advocate from Melbourne, Australia.
