You'd have to fuck up pretty hard on your taxes to ruin your life the way being caught with certain drugs can do. I'm not sure any drug offense can compare to a

You'd have to fuck up pretty hard on your taxes to ruin your life the way being caught with certain drugs can do. I'm not sure any drug offense can compare to a parking ticket. Legalization itself is partly a moral issue, as the state doesn't really have any business telling me what to eat or smoke or inject, or for that matter what plants I grow on my property for personal use. Coupled with drug treatment programs it is also a practical issue: the cost of treating an addict is lower than the cost to the government of keeping him in the justice system for most of his life, lower than the cost to society of keeping him on the margins for most of his life. It's also cheaper solely from a health perspective. It's good policy because it saves money so you don't have to pay so much in taxes and parking tickets in the first place. So there's your answer: we don't have treatment programs for people who can't figure out where to park, or how to pay their taxes, because those are dumb ideas with low ROI.