Your suggestion is what the US has been trying to do for 5 decades now, the problem only gets worse.

As another comment mentioned: if you can't stop drugs getting into prisons, an environment surveilled 24/7 by authorities, full of guards, how exactly do you expect that a land border of 3000+ km can have any meaningful way to be guarded against smuggling?

> But if the border is too porous and impossible to defend against drug smuggling, what is your suggestion? I'll take a guess, because its a famous progressive theory, and based on your vitriol for my view: The government (or associated labs) to produce the drugs and provide them to addicts at low/no-cost, and provide even more $$ and services to addicts to continue their lifestyle? Yeah, thats propaganda and seems to be the leading theory among the technocrats.

The solution will never be a single thing, I cannot comprehend why you Americans are always on the lookout of an easy way out, the silver magical bullet that will solve-it-all™.

You need to address the root causes of the issue, and that's the whole issue with USA's society, you are too individualistic to have empathy, you are too individualistic to believe that helping others will help yourself.

Do you think helping addicts will cost more or less than the amount being wasted through policing and enforcement of a failed attempt? This whole sense of punishment is what drags you down, stop trying to punish someone because their lifestyle offends you and look at what causes them to fall into that hole first. Is it lack of social safety nets? Is it lack of proper education? Is it a lack of opportunities in some areas? The solution will be an immense amount of small solutions, some localised, some national, but it won't ever be "spend more money on the border!".

I'm saddened that you are so deep into this bullshit rabbit hole that you cannot think rationally about a huge issue, which requires many approaches at different levels. Be it helping addicts get safe access to their drugs, in an environment where if anything bad happens they will get help, also in a way they don't get sick with many diseases transmitted by needle sharing (which treatment for will cost even more of your tax dollars); helping addicts to get some stability in their lives: access to housing, to healthcare, to education (things that the whole of your population should have access to given how fucking wealthy your country is); help to rehabilitate functional members of society who are also addicted without costing them an arm and a leg in private rehab centres. These are just simple direct approaches, there are so many more already studied by people much more intelligent and knowledgeable in this area than me, a simpleton layman.

More empathy in your society would help a lot of societal issues you suffer from but are not experienced by other developed societies/economies, it's unfortunate you all live under a culture that doesn't value empathy towards others who you might disagree on their life choices, instead you value punishment, "personal responsibility" instead of "we are all in this together". The lack of togetherness will rip your country apart at some point, you should be working on it not only to solve the drugs issue but many other societal issues that shouldn't be so ever present in the wealthiest country in history.