Unless, do you mean that the laws aren't enforced enough, hence the drug use outside law enforcement? I would argue that increased enforcement still doesn't help the problem, and crime and drug harm increase. Not to mention the public costs of enforcing these laws and imprisoning people on small drug charges with mandatory minimum sentences.
Are these policies helping these people get their lives back on track? I'd say its clearly doing the exact opposite. By offering no consequence to bad behavior, bad behavior continues. If this person was arrested and taken into custody vs released, they'd at least be put into a controlled environment where they would be fed and sheltered and have their medical needs attended to, versus let out onto the street with no direction where they end up right back where they started.
There are costs to the public for sheltering and treating addicted and mentally unwell, certainly, but I'd argue the costs to the public of the status quo are much higher if you were to quantify them. All the petty crime, the emotional toll on innocent people victimized, the price of a life when innocent people are murdered by psychotic people on methamphetamine, the price of ER bills passed on to everyone from someone coming far too late on deaths door with zero insurance, versus the much cheaper price on preventative care that would prevent these situations in the first place, is not a cheap price. But by continuing this status quo this is the price we all bear.
1. https://abc7.com/california-zero-bail-prison-overcrowding-gl...
But they execute you if you have over 500 grams of marijuana so a bit extreme.
I don't know how we could make that work in the US. We already tried alcohol prohibition 100 years ago, and that didn't work. Patent medicines were made illegal, and prescriptions are required, for this reason.
We've already recognized that overprescribed prescription opiates in the early 2000's was a deliberate attempt to bypass these protections and get people hooked.
> How to put that cat in the bag is anyone’s guess.
I think it requires a scientific process instead of a political process. IE, the politicians need to encourage medical professionals to keep trying many different approaches until we figure out what works. This will only happen when politicians stop criminalizing addiction.
FYI: All currently legal treatment options in the US HAVE to target ending addiction. Allowing someone to voluntarily maintain an addiction to anything is currently illegal, and means that only people who voluntarily want to stop their addiction are helped.