The Swiss have approved legal heroin for addicts

The world’s most comprehensive legalized heroin program became permanent Sunday with overwhelming approval from Swiss voters:

The heroin program, started in 1994, is offered in 23 centers across Switzerland. It has helped eliminate scenes of large groups of drug users shooting up openly in parks that marred Swiss cities in the 1980s and 1990s and is credited with reducing crime and improving the health and daily lives of addicts.

The nearly 1,300 selected addicts, who have been unhelped by other therapies, visit one of the centers twice a day to receive the carefully measured dose of heroin produced by a government-approved laboratory.

Now this is a government run program so if you are wondering who pays for it:

Health insurance pays for the bulk of the program, which costs 26 million Swiss francs ($22 million) a year. All residents in Switzerland, which has a population of 7.5 million, are required to have health insurance, with the government paying insurance premiums for those who cannot afford it.

I’m a proponent of decriminalizing drugs and offering non-violent drug offenders rehabilitation. Hell, I’m all for legalizing and regulating drugs. The U.S. actually condones idiocy and I’m all for it. Go ahead and do your coke, heroin, meth and etc. Just don’t be bringing that shit out of your home or in front of kids. It’s just like don’t drink and drive. Kill yourself with it for all I care, we need population reduction anyways. Marijuana definitely needs to get legalized. More and more states are starting to decriminalize it. I feel that alcohol abuse is more devastating than being a pot smoker. I was never big on the old pot, but I drank, believe me I drank myself close to death.

They say that we could save over $46 billion a year if we rehabilitate non-violent drug offenders through drug courts. Housing an inmate in prison can cost up to $40,000 a year while drug court treatment costs up to $3,500 per offender a year.

The U.S. government’s total cost of controlling drugs in 2005 was almost $46 Billion in tax payer money. That includes law enforcement, incarceration, state and federal corrections and legal proceedings. The socioeconomic cost is not included in this total, but a study in 1998 said that the total cost of drug abuse was an estimated $143 Billion.

Read the full story on the Swiss heroin program.

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