[donh]

If you make addicts' landings soft and charge the costs to the taxpayer, you should not be surprised if you see more addicts and more frequent relapses.

Yea, well, that would matter, if the cost of being addicted were actually significant, in a legalized regime, such as occured in the US between the Civil War and World War I.

[winston2]

Let's face the fact that as a society, we will be dealing with this problem till Kingdom come.

The best we can do is look for a comfortable middle ground. By comfortable, I mean a balance of:

education of the hazards of drugs for our youth

lowest cost and danger to our citizens as a whole

respect of individual freedom and personal responsibility

We are not going to completely eliminate drug abuse.

Seems to me the magic formula for this problem as with most other social problems is to make the problem more of a pain to the addict than it is to society. (a take on the personal responsibility angle)