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You're out of your depth on the illegal drug question, I can tell.
For one thing, your hypotheticals are trite, oversimplified just-so stories. And there are plenty of similar "burdens on society" that play out in similar ways, and they don't rise to the status of criminal behavior.
Incidentally, from my not-inconsiderable street experience, I'd posit that heroin addicts are less likely to mug people than a sample from the general population at large.
Yeah, many drug addicts do crimes to get money to feed their habits. Prostitution, identity theft, car theft, burglaries, shoplifting, forgery...but mugging, not so much. That's more of a "2-3 athletic teenage males looking to glory in antisocial power tripping" crime.
Drug users with criminal tendencies who do stickups usually prefer to go after cash registers- and many of the same people would do it for liquor money, or "money to party with."
Crimes are crimes. The ones with actual victims often don't get nearly enough attention paid to them, what with all of the energy and expense spent on the Drug War.
What I can't figure out is- whatever happened to simple civil confiscation? No need to spend time and energy arresting, booking, trying, convicting, and imprisoning illegal drug dealers- just take away their unlicensed inventory, toss it in a bucket of paint. No business can survive that for long.
