The prohibition of certain psychoactive drugs and the consequent police repression result in thousands of deaths from violent actions in Brazil each year. In this work, we quantify the magnitude of this problem based on some economic and public health indicators. Taking 2017 as a reference, we estimate that homicides related to drug prohibition lead to a reduction in life expectancy at birth for Brazilians of 4.2 months, or a loss of 1.148 million years of potential life. Following the methodology adopted by Daniel Cerqueira and Rodrigo Soares, we also estimate the welfare cost of this tragedy for the country, which corresponds to approximately R$ 50 billion annually, or 0.77% of gross domestic product (GDP).