[mirhagk]

I do believe we need to discourage hard drug use, but criminalization simply isn't doing that.

You mention cigarettes, and cigarette usage has actually been dropping pretty dramatically over the last few decades. This is because instead of prohibition (like was tried and failed with alcohol) the government took the approach of educating people and creating social pressures to get people to stop.

The same could absolutely be done with heroin et al. Create places where people can legally buy and consume heroin (under the supervision of nurses) and all the while advertise how terrible it is and offer addiction counselling etc.

The problem is that such a system would have to be run with the explicit goal of getting people to stop and the US's fondness for running everything privately would be disastrous in this case.