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Prohibitionism is the belief that citizens will abstain from enjoyable and/or profitable actions if these are typed as illegal, and/or prohibitions are supported by force (enforcement). This belief is responsible for many acts of legislation. The usual targets of prohibitionism include gambling, use of psychoactive substances and sexual behaviors. It has also been used to justify legislation against various forms of social interaction.

Prohibitionism is dependent upon effective enforcement of the legislation. This becomes problematic because the majority of the targets of prohibitionism are in the category of victimless crime, where the harm that comes from the crime is non-existent, questionable, or only to the person who performs the act. Enforcement becomes a conflict between violation of statue and violation of free will. Since the acts are enjoyable, enforcement is often the most harmful choice to the individual. This results in laws that are rarely enforced by anybody who does not have a financial or personal motivation to do so.

The difficulty of enforcing this class of laws results in selective enforcement, where the enforcers select the people they wish to prosecute based on other criterion. This criterion often results in descriminatory practices against those of other races, creeds, nationalities or financial status.

Prohibitionism based laws have the added problem of calling attention to the behavior that they are attempting to prohibit. This can make the behavior interesting and exciting, and cause its popularity to increase.

• Temperance movement
• Lobbying
• Prohibition

• Re-thinking drug control policy - Historical perspectives and conceptual tools by Peter Cohen
• Policy from a harm reduction perspective (journal article)
• Global drug prohibition: its uses and crises (journal article)
• Self-administration behavior is maintained by the psychoactive ingredient of marijuana in squirrel monkeys (journal article)
• Should cannabis be taxed and regulated? (journal article)
• Learning from history: a review of David Bewley-Taylor’s The United States and International Drug Control, 1909–1997 (journal article)
• Shifting the main purposes of drug control: from suppression to regulation of use
• Setting goals for drug policy: harm or use reduction?
• Prohibition, pragmatism and drug policy repatriation
• Challenging the UN drug control conventions: problems and possibilities
• The Economics of Drug Legalization

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