A few years ago, Multnomah County and the City of Portland started a program to guarantee housing for all homeless families. It had to shut down, after becoming overwhelmed by people from across Oregon, it's neighboring states, and across the United States generally [1]:
"More than 800 adults, representing about 500 families, answered the question. About 45 percent gave addresses in Portland or Multnomah County. Significant numbers said their last addresses had been in other cities in the Portland metro area that do not fund the shelter, including Vancouver, Beaverton and Oregon City. Smaller numbers said they’d come from communities across western Oregon, including Salem, Eugene, Medford and Seaside. And about one-third of the shelter residents reported their last permanent address wasn’t in Oregon. They came from dozens of states, including Alaska, Nevada, Louisiana, Texas and Virginia."
I can't imagine that the results of implementing a locally based legal drugs harm reduction policy would be any different. The United States needs policies like this applied at the Federal level if they are going to work.
[1] https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-oregon-homeless-ch...
The short of the video is that you need rehabilitation for these drug users AND you need accountability. When you pick up a drug user, you give them two options: rehab or jail. Fail out of rehab, go to jail.
Unsurprisingly, most people pick rehab. In either case, the problem is solved for the rest of society.
We give people the resources and help to solve their problem without letting them jerk the rest of us around. It seems like a fair compromise to me.
The advantage of prescribed safe supply is that drug users are now interacting with the medical system and this is a touch point where medical professionals can interact with drug users directly and divert people that are ready for counseling and rehab to those options.
The only way to break the cycle is to have a safe supply of prescribed drugs, an alternative to (often literally toxic) street drugs. This would mean that persons don't need to raise money to buy street drugs, which should reduce the related petty theft, but this is not the status quo "war on drugs" approach so it remains politically challenging for weak politicians.
The status quo continues where police pretty much don't have options other than to harass drug users and confiscate drugs, which only makes things worse as drug users with no money now have to raise more money yet again to buy more drugs, potentially stealing again.
The "tough on crime" path is often advocated by people frustrated and wanting to see police knock some heads around, but it leads to the unsustainable and wildly expensive absurdities of like jailing people for stealing deoderant and such incredibly minor crimes.