There hasn't been a serious "war on drugs" for over 30 years in the UK. Most drugs are de-facto legal since the laws are simply not enforced. To say "prohibition of drugs is a counterproductive failure" is a straw-man, because there is no enforcement. The laws would probably have been dropped many years ago were it not for international treaty obligations.
Rajoy has made a simple calculation: jackboots in the faces of peaceful Catalans trying to vote equals more votes for the Partido Popular in the rest of Spain.
I think it would be really interesting to build something like dispora as a suite of dockerised micro-services which would allow you to add and extend functionality based on a new social-networkong protocol in a language-agnostic way. It would also be very easy to incorporate email and xmpp which are already federated protocols.
I think it's quite ethical, because it removes the burden from law-abiding people. There's also evidence to show that punishment works as a deterrent when applied as uniformly as possible, hence saving people from falling into the misery of criminality.