In the broad sense, a proposition like creating a safe supply of prescribed drugs makes sense. If I recall correctly, this is how the U.K. used to treat heroin

In the broad sense, a proposition like creating a safe supply of prescribed drugs makes sense. If I recall correctly, this is how the U.K. used to treat heroin addicts, until the war on drugs became a widespread practice. Vancouver, B.C. has also experimented with a vending machine approach to provide opioid addicts with a daily maintenance dose of legal drugs. However, I think there's a big catch: a policy like this needs to be implemented everywhere in a given country at once. Otherwise, the locations that do have it will become magnets for the entire country's population of addicts. A few years ago, Multnomah County and the City of Portland started a program to guarantee housing for all homeless families. It had to shut down, after becoming overwhelmed by people from across Oregon, it's neighboring states, and across the United States generally [1]: "More than 800 adults, representing about 500 families, answered the question. About 45 percent gave addresses in Portland or Multnomah County. Significant numbers said their last addresses had been in other cities in the Portland metro area that do not fund the shelter, including Vancouver, Beaverton and Oregon City. Smaller numbers said they’d come from communities across western Oregon, including Salem, Eugene, Medford and Seaside. And about one-third of the shelter residents reported their last permanent address wasn’t in Oregon. They came from dozens of states, including Alaska, Nevada, Louisiana, Texas and Virginia." I can't imagine that the results of implementing a locally based legal drugs harm reduction policy would be any different. The United States needs policies like this applied at the Federal level if they are going to work. [1] https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-oregon-homeless-children-shelter-families/ https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-oregon-homeless-ch...