My personal take is that legalization and criminalization are not antonyms but represent two extremes of a thorny problem - mainly that the "victimless" in "victimless crime" is entirely dependent on how you define the externalities. Your "stupid decisions" are entirely your own problem up to the point where you break into my wife's mailbox hunting for checks to cash (as happened last night). Except not even that's true because by the time you're breaking into strangers' mailboxes looking for checks to cash, you've likely torn a swath of destruction through your extended family that extends from unpaid loans to purse raidings to check fraud.

The threat of punishment is failing to curb most people's addictions. It's foolish to assume that the abstract threat of jail at some point in the indeterminate future will have a deterrent effect when the majority of crimes committed by addicts are crimes of opportunity.

I don't have any pet solutions to this problem. I don't know what works. I know that society is rarely served by increasing the prison population and I know that when you incentivize doctors to prescribe addictive substances to patients you are likely to end up with more addicts. Is that their fault? Should they know better? Don't we all wish. The problem with most "you do you, I do me" forms of government and policing end up with the failures living a hardscrabble existence outside the barricades while those of us who don't fail are still talking over security options with the goddamn landlord.

I don't remember where I heard it, but someone described heroin as a high interest rate credit card for your pleasure centers. You can spend well beyond your means but once you hit your credit limit the bills are murder.

My high school posse has a bodycount of 5 associated with heroin and its distribution.