It becomes more grey than you're willing to admit. It's fairly hard to ignore the link between hard drug use and participation is various crimes. Pretending they're not linked and treating them such is to be too blinkered to see the bigger picture.

On the other hand if i follow my own logic all the way through you are, at least on a theoretical level, correct.

I need to get some thick socks, the floor just froze.

If there is a causal link between drug use and community harm, then it no longer becomes a simple case of personal freedom.

If 90% of heroin users reach a state where they do damage to someone else's person or property (theft, etc.) or to where they require the resources of the community to sustain them (welfare, medicare, emergency room care), which they cannot pay for, then their expression of freedom comes at a cost to the community. At that point the community has the right to limit the activity that leads to the violation.

-sm

The link between hard drug users and crime is almost entirely due to the fact that those drugs are prohibited. Black markets normally made up of criminals are more than happy to supply people because prohibition drives the cost of these drugs to 14,000% or more of the price they would be if they were legal. Addicts can't afford these prices and commit crimes so they can pay for what they need.

If drugs were legal, the criminal element would be removed, drugs would be safer, and the price of drugs would be so cheap that those addicted to them would be able to afford them without stealing or committing crimes against others.

So any link between drug use that might exist is irrelevant because it would be gone were drugs legal. And as far as medical costs, treatment, etc. go, I'm against the government forcing anyone to provide healthcare. Healthcare is not a right. Nobody has a right to any product or service they don't pay for. But even if we did have government treat addicts, it would cost probably less than 10% of what we pay currently to jail them.

We are also skipping over the fact that inexpensive to produce, relatively benign drugs get replaced by dangerous crap when the benign stuff gets hard to find because it's illegal.

I wasn't speaking of you in particular, just in general. It's a major element of many of todays ideas leave out personal responsibilty for blind causality.