> To me, this is complete fantasy because there's never been a substance ban that has been very effective at reducing usage of a popular substance That stateme

> To me, this is complete fantasy because there's never been a substance ban that has been very effective at reducing usage of a popular substance That statement is more or less true in a broad sense, but at the level of individual substances, bans can be quite effective. There have been cases of recreational drugs effectively disappearing due to changes in law or de facto bans. It has happened especially with pharmaceuticals. Quaalude, a prescription sleeping pill, was popular recreationally in the 70s and early 80s (see, e.g., Cheech and Chong's Up In Smoke), but it was put into schedule I of the CSA in the mid 80s, which made it illegal for all purposes. Supposedly, there were bootleg versions for a short time, but it has long since faded into legend (control of precursor chemicals might have been the final decisive blow). The same happened with many prescription drugs of the 60s and 70s, which were either banned outright, severely restricted, and/or voluntarily withdrawn by the manufacturer due to pressure. Barbiturates used to be popular, but, although they're currently in schedule II and not banned outright, they're prescribed so infrequently that they're as good as gone. The most recent prescription to disappear due to gov't action was Rohypnol (but I suspect the popularity of this drug was overblown). If you read the text of the CSA, you'll find a long list of obscure names of drugs of all types that are not actively traded anywhere on earth, some of which probably never had significant markets, but others of which certainly did, or could have. It's true that overall, drug prohibition has been fantastically ineffective at eliminating drug use; cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana continue to flood in, supplied by international drug trafficking organizations. But there's a cat-and-mouse game that goes on, and some drugs more than others are vulnerable to government action.