Addiction is a disease and should only be a health issue and not a criminal issue.

So we aren't beating a dead horse here: Yes it is expensive to incarcerate. If we find, though, that incarceration is not historically effective for a given crime ... then a different form of punishment needs to be applied. I'm not going to advocate that all people are even worth the effort. Most people being incarcerated are not even worth the money they are draining from the system were they to get out, and certainly not worth the money for medical treatment. Life sentences, for example, are a total waste of time. Forcing an offender to sit in jail the entirety of their life is supposed to bring some sort of satisfaction to everyone that put them there? Its supposed to re-condition him? For what? The afterlife? "10% of people are addicts and are more vulnerable to drugs and alcohol than other people." A vulnerability to being an addict does not make you an addict. It still requires a personal choice to be made. Personal choice is punishable. The subsequent addiction and loss of personal choice may not be ... but it started with a personal choice at some point to use the drug. That is why drug addiction is inherently different from the other diseases you keep referencing. I think it an error on your part to continue to group them because of the disease title and not the more important and more descriptive title of addiction. Addiction says more about the disease, and a lot about how it was manifested. It is in a different ballpark. I will not waste time countering bubonic plague comparisons because they have no weight here. Addiction is a behavioral. By countering it medically you may remove the feeling of needing it ... but you do not solve the issue of the person executing unlawful acts of use in the first place. When first it starts, the body has no idea or want for any drug. The introduction of that drug that grows into an addiction is a failure in discipline on the part of the user and also perhaps a failure on the part of the public and of the community (if these people are a product of their surroundings). Sectioning them off from the public eye removes more than just the disease from the populous ... it removes the views, lifestyles, and temptation that drove this person to try it in the first place from infecting the rest of the community. It also couples a sort of punishment on the society by making an example of the offender ... a further deterrent to the infection of the community as their will to use will be countered by the knowledge that they will have to pay for their crimes. To your point about some people being susceptible and other not so much, I say to you that everyone's susceptibility is decreased when drug laws are in place. As costly as they may be, they reduce overall use by a substantial amount because the majority of people are not as susceptible, do not carry addiction the same, and do not prioritize drug use over their lives. Your solution seems to target 1 person (the addict) and completely disregards the rest of the community he'll be released to. To your statement about international effectiveness: http://www.whichcountry.co... The US is farther below countries that treat it medically on the list of per capita usage. The rest of the population is getting the picture from legal enforcement. France - <2x the per capita usage of pills by the population than in the US. Im certain this is one of the countries you think we should be modeling? And I thought it even more ironic that it was prescription pills being the drug most prevalently abused. I wonder if there isn't some correlation there with the fact that they treat everything from a medical standpoint. Basically I think we need to gravitate away from this idea that we want to imprison people with heart disease ... because of course that is ridiculous. Look at addiction specifically and see how it is different from other diseases. It manifests itself differently than a virus.