Although governments throughout the world have adopted drug prohibition as a policy because of pressure from the United States and a few powerful allies, governments of all types all over the world have found drug prohibition useful for their own purposes for several reasons. Drug prohibition has given all types of governments additional police and military powers, as police and military narcotics units can go undercover almost anywhere to investigate. Drug prohibition has also required at least some antidrug crusades and "drug demonization," which depicts "drugs" as extremely dangerous and destructive substances. Giving drugs this powerful image of evil enables governments to attribute many of their countries' social and economic ills to drug trafficking and consumption. Since the early 1980's, harm-reduction workers and activists in Europe and increasingly throughout the world have focused on providing drug users and addicts with a range of services aimed at reducing the harmful effects of drug use. Harm reduction as a movement within the policy of drug prohibition shifts the drug policy from the criminalized and punitive emphasis to the more decriminalized and openly regulated aspect of the drug policy continuum. This involves a movement away from punishment, coercion, and repression and toward tolerance, regulation, and public health. In many countries, however, influential groups representing various helping professions as well as drug users themselves have criticized the policy of drug prohibition as an extreme reaction that is unnecessarily punitive and destructive of the lives of individual users and their families. Because of the international treaties and the economic and political sanctions that bind nations to the treaties, many nations are independently reforming their drug prohibition laws and making them less criminalized. Currently, however, no country in the world can formally end its national prohibition regime without facing massive economic and political retribution from powerful countries that zealously pursue the enforcement of drug prohibition. Still, as accurate information about drug effects and alternative drug policies becomes more widespread, an increasing number of countries, especially democratic ones, will likely choose not to retain full-scale criminalized drug prohibition. 22 references and appended discussion of research on global drug prohibition