As modern societies have encountered intoxication, they have sought to regulate and criminalise it as a threat to public order, personal and economic development and the public good. Drug control has become a hybrid of state and private regulation and sanctioning, some of which entirely disregards due process and citizenship rights. Drugs can be understood as cultural algorithms, in the sense of independent entities into which human pathologies and desires are embedded. Illicit intoxications and their problems have to be worked at, recognised and transformed in a cultural context. These developments are analysed in terms of symbolic order and power, which is related to the location of consumers and producers of illicit drugs in terms of economic power and cultural status.