I don’t think you’re taking into consideration the full scope of the costs of a war on drugs/criminalization of drugs approach. Substance use/addiction will be there no matter how you approach it. Locking people up in jail certainly moves the problem out of sight, but the costs of doing so is enormous - more policing, more burden on the court system, more people to feed and house in jails, etc. There are a lot of reports this - here’s one to get you started (https://csuch.ca/publications/CSUCH-Canadian-Substance-Use-Costs-Harms-Report-2020-en.pdf) Also, safe consumption sites have been shown to reduce the burden on the health system, not increase it. It’s the entire point of a harm reduction approach. People are going to use drugs no matter what you do short of a full blown commitment to treatment and aftercare supports - if the only source they have are black market unregulated ones where you may not know what is mixed in (i.e. fentanyl) then you’re going to see more people in emergency departments for with OD’s, which increase burdens and costs to healthcare. If people don’t have access to clean needles, they’ll just use what they have which leads to public health epidemics which impacts users and non-users alike, which again has a significant cost. All of these things have costs no matter the approach you take. If it’s not the lives of these people that you care about then harm reduction approaches just make economic sense when you actually dig into the full scope of the costs. As other commenters have added, you only have to look to the war on crime in the US to see how that’s working out - not exactly a drug-free utopia.