Drawing on two chapters from my new book, Rethinking Drug Laws (2023, OUP), this paper examines the politics of the ‘drug question’. It explores how we can understand what exactly is at stake when drugs and drug control become matters of political contestation. Using concepts drawn from political science, it argues that rather than the politicisation of drugs being a barrier to drug law reform efforts, a serious engagement with politics and ideology is essential to finding better ways of regulating drugs. The drug question is ineluctably political. Surfacing the politics of drug control in this way highlights the need to understand law and policy not simply as technical solutions to social problems but also as about competing visions of the ‘good society’. The paper goes on to explore what a ‘better’ politics of drugs would look like and how we might achieve it. It examines different approaches to normative thinking (propositions about how the world should be) and reviews the debate on ‘public social science’. It then considers ways in which drug politics could be democratised, not only through creating more spaces for democratic deliberation but also by ‘thinking democratically’ in a broader sense. It argues for the necessity of developing a cosmopolitan vision of politics which moves beyond Western-centrism. In conclusion, the paper suggests the need to amplify the voices of those who most directly experience the punitive edge of prohibition, especially in the Global South.