We have categories and classifications. Soft or hard drugs. Or the narcotic schedules, as they're called. We have taxonomies. Before you make people serve time, no one has taken the time, or given the time, to consider what it is that we're as a culture so phobic about.
Time is the major problem here.
There's nothing else to be given. It is the gift. This is one of the major problems of our modernity which is the speed as Paul Virilio calls it, and also the need to resist acceleration when thinking about it. We're enmeshed in a culture that's vampiric of time. It's a difficult challenge to act constructively.