This article synthesizes neuroscience findings with long-standing criminological models and data into a comprehensive explanation of the relationship between drug use and crime. The innate factors that make some people vulnerable to drug use are conceptually similar to those that predict criminality, supporting a spurious reciprocal model of the drugs-crime relationship. Simultaneously, police pressure and penalty severity, the principal tools of the drug war, inflate the cost of drugs, which drives most drug-related crime. Concluding that much drug war rhetoric is the misleading product of a moral panic, this perspective supports a harm reduction approach to ameliorating the drug war.