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I would expect the financial costs of providing a welfare state to decrease if you offered drug addicts their choice of addiction treatment or free drugs. Right

I would expect the financial costs of providing a welfare state to decrease if you offered drug addicts their choice of addiction treatment or free drugs. Right now addicts are pushed toward treatment even if they don't want it. Common street drugs are inexpensive to manufacture. Treatment services are subject to Baumol's cost disease. Treatments are also unlikely to permanently alter behaviors of people who are being pushed toward behavioral changes rather than spontaneously seeking to change. The state could buy an addict a 40 year supply of opiates (wholesale) at the same cost as 3 months of outpatient rehab. Incarceration is even more expensive than outpatient treatment.

tomohawk 6y ago
That is your choice of what the state's treatment ought to be. You see how drug dependence leads to dependence on the state? How the state becomes a drug dealer? And the family of that addict will still suffer. That requires yet more state support. This ends up with a system where drug dependence is subsidized by the state and taxpayers. Things that are subsidized tend to increase. But the mechanism by which the state will intervene may very well be different once the cost of that approach becomes known, and people who are working and paying taxes decide they want the mechanism to be different.