This chapter shows that the political decision to prohibit drugs has produced a highly restrictive and distorted form of “drug criminal law,” eroding many of the constitutional principles that should underpin it and generating criminal policies characteristic of a state of exception, thereby rendering them illegitimate within a democratic rule-of-law framework. It further highlights the securitization of prohibitionist criminal policies within the so-called risk society of postmodernity, and then turns to a more recent context, described here as post-democracy, in which financial totalitarianism operates in symbiosis with the criminalized drug state, aggravating the legitimacy crisis of criminal policies directed at controlling substances rendered illegal. The chapter also outlines two fundamental illegitimacies common to all prohibitionist criminal policies—the fallacy of protecting public health as a legal interest and the disproportionate nature of such regulations in every dimension—demonstrating that the prohibitionist model is inadequate, unnecessary, and excessive, as well as conducive to serious human rights violations.