Daily maintenance doses of heroin for a typical addict costs less than $20 (we know, because medical grade heroin is in use in a number of countries for post-op pain). Compare that to the cost of policing, or incarcerating these users, and health care costs that are massively exacerbated by impurities and unknown dose strengths, and offering free prescriptions for pure versions of many drugs would likely save us massive amounts of money.
Especially when indirect crimes (e.g. robberies to finance drug habits) are taken into account, as well as reduced tax revenues (from drug addicts that are unable to function in work places due to the current system).
Getting people to stop using would be preferable, but it is not realistic to get most people to even start to deal with until they're not hounded by police and spending most of their time struggling to scrounge up the money for their next hit. I'd be willing to bet that even in purely economic terms, handing free drugs to most drug addicts in clean forms and predictable doses would likely have a massive ROI for society even in purely economic terms because of the reduced damage - both to users health and due to crime - and increased tax revenue from actually getting many of these addicts back to relatively normal lives (even most heroin addicts can function relatively normally when they don't have to worry about where their next hit is going to come from).
In human terms, the suffering that is directly caused by criminalisation of many of these drugs today is downright disgusting - we'd be hard pressed to come up with anything worse (unless we allow unregulated marketing and sales to children or something).
Daily maintenance doses of heroin for a typical addict costs less than $20 (we know, because medical grade heroin is in use in a number of countries for post-op pain). Compare that to the cost of policing, or incarcerating these users, and health care costs that are massively exacerbated by impurities and unknown dose strengths, and offering free prescriptions for pure versions of many drugs would likely save us massive amounts of money.
Especially when indirect crimes (e.g. robberies to finance drug habits) are taken into account, as well as reduced tax revenues (from drug addicts that are unable to function in work places due to the current system).
Getting people to stop using would be preferable, but it is not realistic to get most people to even start to deal with until they're not hounded by police and spending most of their time struggling to scrounge up the money for their next hit. I'd be willing to bet that even in purely economic terms, handing free drugs to most drug addicts in clean forms and predictable doses would likely have a massive ROI for society even in purely economic terms because of the reduced damage - both to users health and due to crime - and increased tax revenue from actually getting many of these addicts back to relatively normal lives (even most heroin addicts can function relatively normally when they don't have to worry about where their next hit is going to come from).
In human terms, the suffering that is directly caused by criminalisation of many of these drugs today is downright disgusting - we'd be hard pressed to come up with anything worse (unless we allow unregulated marketing and sales to children or something).