>Crime Issues: 60% drop in felony crimes by patients (80% drop after one year in the program). 82% drop in patients selling heroin.
>Death Rates: No one has died from a heroin overdose since the inception of the program. The heroin used is inspected for purity and strength by technicians.
>Disease Rates: New infections of Hepatitis and HIV have been reduced for patients in the program.
>New Use Rates: Slightly lower than expected. 1) As reported in the Lancet June 3, 2006, the medicalisation of using heroin has tarnished the image of heroin and made it unattractive to young people. 2) Most new users are introduced to heroin by members of their social group and 50% of users also deal to support their habit. Therefore, with so many users/sellers in treatment, non-users have fewer opportunities to be exposed to heroin, especially in the rural areas.
>*Cost Issues: 48 dollars/day: Patient costs are covered by national health insurance agency. Patients pay 700 dollars/year for the compulsory insurance. Note: The Swiss save about 38 dollars per day per patient mostly in lowered costs for court and police time, due to less crime committed by the patients.
[0] http://www.citizensopposingprohibition.org/resources/swiss-h...
Legalized drugs would absolutely deprive criminals of domestic profits but there would still be gangs that export and fight over that black market. For example large amounts of marijuana in Canada ends up exported to Vietnam and sold at every newspaper stand in Hanoi for premium prices to the new middle class users there. The various gangs shoot each other here on a regular basis for control of that export operation or rob legal grows to get free product. In other words large amounts of money will have to go to export prevention enforcement.
The best argument for legalized/regulated narcotics is it prevents this kind of synthetic opioid medical disaster by either prescribing heroin to addicts or selling it without prohibition price spikes due to busts, so the incentive to import cheaper synthetics is gone and drug quality could be more easily identified by the end user. The income from any sales can go to treatment to prevent new addicts but many of us remember having been promised by governments who run gambling/lotteries how that money would go towards gambling addiction treatment and instead it just disappeared into general revenue.
I don't think there's any data out yet, but the idea was to prevent overdoses, but also provide clean syringes to avoid HIV transmission.
I don't have any stats to provide, but if your interested (as far as heroin) check out the Netherlands. Last i knew they had a program.
Edit: I believe the Netherlands have had their program since sometime in the 90's, so there should be data available.
How much safer would 'recreational users' be if they had a legal, clean (pure), supply and a place to use it where they are monitored?
As the parent posts have said, the above combined with help for getting out of the hole in the same place would probably be more effective. It would /ALSO/ be the most effective way of defeating the criminals that make money off of the drugs; by depriving them of sales.