[tomwalker]

Also:

Deaths due to overdose of opiates, for example, accounted for 9% of deaths in young Australian adults under the age of 50 in 1998 and for more than 10% in several European cities despite the fact that they were used by less than 1% of adults in any year.

572kg of methadone, which is not the only heroin substitute, is prescribed each year. The cost of the medical staff, the supervised consumption, security around it etc is enormous. That is for a population of 5 million people in the whole of Scotland.

No evidence exists of any sustained heroin shortage or reduction in the number of heroin users in the UK over the study period. In fact, all indices of the availability and use of heroin, including deaths due to heroin overdose, rose steadily during the study period,41 as did the number of heroin dependent people being treated by methadone maintenance.

http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c4851.full

[da_dude4242]

>The cost of the medical staff, the supervised consumption, security around it etc is enormous. That is for a population of 5 million people in the whole of Scotland.

How does that compare to the cost of running drug enforcement agencies, prisons, or treating preventable drug related diseases?