Heroin's problem isn't so much it's physical danger more the shackles of addiction that this drug inflicts. Drug of dependency describes opiates very well. Once you cross a line you become a slave to it's clutches, ironic considering people who call for it's legalisation argue that all they want is personal freedom. If any drug steals your freedom and independence it is opiates. Functional addicts are no better than slaves, and what government in their right mind would want to be the puppet master in charge of the strings for a generation of junkies?
I don't want 'personal freedom' (well, I do, I'm just not particularly interested in it as an ideal in relation to drugs), I want to bring a lawless and deeply damaging black market back within the folds of legal regulation. You can't pretend the market doesn't already exist, it does and it is stupendously large, it generates unthinkable amount of cash and it eats away at the rule of law and even the very sovereignty of nation-states. Abandoning a behemoth like the global drug-market to organised crime is monumentally short-sighted and the resulting mess is clear as day for anyone who cares to look.
Where there is demand, you will always get supply. Nothing is going to change that basic rule of human behaviour. If you abandon that space you simply create a vacuum that is quickly filled. Now, that's not to say that the only alternative is just open-slather, legal drug availability, the key is regulation: how do you meet a pre-existing demand in the safest, least costly and ethical way possible.
For marijuana, that might involve simply selling like we do booze today: legal, highly monitored, regulated, taxed but otherwise freely available to any adult over the age of eighteen. Whereas for heroin, it might be something like the Swiss model of providing maintenance doses of pharmaceutical grade heroin to registered addicts. Personally, I'd make tobacco at the same level of restriction as heroin, give people free tobacco, administered in black packaging by the state via pharmacies to registered addicts, while simultaneously reaching out to them with support services for kicking their addiction etc. Anyone who really, really wants to keep smoking can do that programme, others who are happy to could go onto subsidised onto nicotine replacement drugs or prescription anti-smoking drugs etc. Great thing too about a programme like this is that it pays for itself, the money saved from simply not enforcing the drug laws would easily run into the billions and would likely exceed what you'd have to put into a programme like this.
You have to remember that, after nearly a century of prohibition, there's only one recreational drug the usage of which has declined and that's tobacco. It's exactly *because* tobacco is a drug that is produced, sold and consumed within the confines of legal structure that efforts to restrict its use have been so successful. Health authorities have been able tightly regulate the market; the way it is sold, who it is sold to, the way that it is promoted and who it is promoted to, the price that it is sold at etc. etc. etc. When you make something illegal all off that is out of reach to the authorities, there is no way of controlling it.
There really is no other choice. People want drugs, until you can change that then people are going to supply drugs. The only question is, do you leave that to the crims or should the state have some semblance of control over things.
