@Greatest I am,
Greatest I am wrote:
Look at the cost of incarceration versus the cost of medical supervision and note how much we would save.
How much is it worth to you to pay for a system that saves lives instead of costing the lives of our young and having to pay for a drug war that cannot be won?
Why do you want to make the day of criminals?
What you are describing is something more general about a society that has socialist tendencies, and it is this:
1) Imagine a state of maximum efficiency, where cost-savings are maximized. In the case of recreational drugs, that state is sobriety, where no money has to be spent on drugs, incarceration, treatment, or anything else.
2) Now imagine there are people who don't want that state of maximum efficiency to exist, because they want there to be expenditures happening that make other people money, whether through incarceration, treatment programs, or just drug sales themselves.
3) Now what you are arguing, and what socialism/insurance logic argues generally is that we should choose a less-expensive socialism over a more expensive economy because there is no possibility of achieving maximum efficiency states such as sobriety, which cost nothing.
Well, you may be right or you may not, but I dislike the idea of promoting socialism by comparing it to something more expensive.
That said, there comes a point where nothing is working to achieve sobriety and/or a sustainable economy, and so more efficient forms of socialism actually represent an improvement beyond less-efficient ones that are going on in practice.
At that point, you might elect to substitute the more-efficient socialism for the less-efficient one, but the danger would be that you would accept that as a final state/solution, instead of maintaining awareness that there is a more efficient state yet, i.e. sobriety, which should be the ultimate goal.
Then the question becomes what is the most effective way to move toward the more efficient state, e.g. sobriety, without getting stuck in a semi-efficient state because it is convenient, e.g. rotating between different drugs instead of just getting sober completely.
So, for example, you could have someone in a drug-management program with absolutely no motivation to get sober because they feel safe and secure rotating drugs. But then news comes down the pipeline that the management program they're on is going to be cut/cancelled and if they go back to seeking drugs on the streets, there is a good chance whatever they find will contain lethal amounts of fentanyl and that would motivate them toward getting sober instead of just rotating drugs.
See my point? It's not that drug-management by rotating drugs isn't better than some alternative. It's that there is a better alternative, sobriety, that might fall further out of reach the longer an addict gets comfortable in a managed-drug-rotation program. It's a hard choice, because what if the person ends up backsliding and getting something on the streets that kills them, or they end up contracting HIV or some other disease from a needle, etc.?
The war on drugs is a very hard war to fight, and legalization/management/etc. are just possible tactics in the war, not an alternative to it. Many people don't like to use the language of 'war,' but that's really what it is whether you're fighting addiction at the personal level and losing or whether you are fighting the economic exploitation and waste that go hand in hand to make money off people who have been baited into self-harm and harm of others.
