That's not right. It's not that they don't allow open drug scenes.
In Lisbon you can easily find the part of town where everyone is smoking weed outside.
With Switzerland if you want your free heroin it's at the doctor's office and you get it injected there. So it's not a matter of not allowing it. Addicts not surprisingly go where the drugs are. Which is inside now.
Back when they treated it as a crime problem they would shut down outdoor drug camps and the camps would just reappear somewhere else nearby.
The theft went down because the addicts don't need to pay. It's not about better enforcement as you implied. The theft also went down because a lot of the addicts are now employed. As long as you can get your daily injections, most heroin addicts are highly functional. Dr. Halsted - one of the founders of John Hopkins hospital and a hard working doctor - was addicted to morphine for most of his long adult life.
Not quite - the Swiss system much prefers substitutions than giving out actual heroin. And the police do enforce drug laws, mostly against the dealer networks but also against individuals for possession for other drugs. Also it's not like heroin is legalized. You must have been an addict for at least two years to get it from the health system, and it's a last resort, you must have failed at least two other addiction treatments first.
The Swiss approach was also somewhat specific to heroin. If you read about it, it's always heroin that's being discussed. The policy could work because there aren't huge numbers of addicts and the number has been in natural decline for a long time. Addicts are mostly old so the population is shrinking, the cost of giving them free drugs is low. Heroin addiction was a phase, people moved onto different drugs now, but the decline is often attributed entirely to this policy.
So what do we see if we look at e.g. crystal meth or cocaine? Not so successful there. Swiss cities dominate cocaine consumption in Europe:
Numbers of addicts are growing and the police do enforce the law, albeit in Neuchâtel for the first meth offense (of possession) you can get out of it if you attend some counselling sessions. After that it's back to prosecution.
They aren't handing out crystal meth, suffice it to say.
There is also the ethical issues involved with forcing people who stayed clean to pay for other people's addictions, which is what this boils down to. Of course it can still be rational when considering other costs but that doesn't change the underlying ethical issues.
In Lisbon you can easily find the part of town where everyone is smoking weed outside.
With Switzerland if you want your free heroin it's at the doctor's office and you get it injected there. So it's not a matter of not allowing it. Addicts not surprisingly go where the drugs are. Which is inside now.
Back when they treated it as a crime problem they would shut down outdoor drug camps and the camps would just reappear somewhere else nearby.
The theft went down because the addicts don't need to pay. It's not about better enforcement as you implied. The theft also went down because a lot of the addicts are now employed. As long as you can get your daily injections, most heroin addicts are highly functional. Dr. Halsted - one of the founders of John Hopkins hospital and a hard working doctor - was addicted to morphine for most of his long adult life.