"My kids are going to have enough problems trying to make it to retirement age." red

Being a terminal branch on the family tree might not feel very noble. But on a planet this size, infested with over 6,000,000,000 humans, noble may be precisely what being grandchildless is.
Will mankind be helped or harmed by this deprivation? Who cares?
"i wonder if it is a paradox..." amh

A paradox in the sense that prohibition is sometimes presented as demonstrating absolute control.
And if it worked, we might call it that.

But not only does it not work; it has precisely the opposite affect from that claimed for it.
Don't take my word for it. Just read what one of the most rabid, high ranking U.S. Drug Warriors has to say about it:
"In 1960 in this country [U.S.] there were only 4,000,000 people in the entire nation who had ever used an illicit drug at any time in their life. By 1990 we had 80,000,000 people in this country who had used illicit drugs at any time in their life, and the numbers who became hard core, frequent users were proportional and commensurate." DEA Administrator Thomas Constantine

Translation:
What we're doing is clearly counterproductive. Therefore we must do more of it.
"if the ones writing the laws somehow profit from the criminal network" amh

I suspect hedonism. Anal retentalism is at its essence, self-indulgence. These Drug Warrior conspirators to treason are not championing righteousness. They're indulging their own sadism, masqueraded as promoting virtue.
But they're not virtuous. They're traitorous.