So far the results appear positive; there have been no fatal overdoses at the facility, and anecdotal evidence suggests that drug users at the sites tend to be "cleaner"

Quite the high standard there. Isn't it only a matter of time though? Some idiot mixes the wrong thing in his home chemistry set and next thing you know a dozen junkies end up dying of a hot dose in the facility? I'm not deriding the place, though. It's probably a better idea than having an OD face down in some ditch.

What port1080 said. Legalize drugs (marijuana at least -- the rest we need to have a serious discussion about as a country that I do not think would ever happen) and take it from there. I think if this was legalized you'd kind of have a similar situation as the countries that have alcohol at an early age. Less mystification, more responsibility. You'd still get the smokehounds and waste-os that would have gotten high continuously no matter what, but you'd probably get less recreational users doing it for the thrill of breaking the law and then getting hooked.

   Oh, not that I didn't try everything else I could get my hands on for a while- never did get a chance to try peyote- but for some reason heroin and cigarettes weren't attractive. Probably the needle thing, and by the time I found out you could snort heroin, the desire to give it a go had been erased by other experimentation. (Meth was scary, and scary attractive at the same time.) Cigarettes was probably just a money issue-- saving up to party once in a while was a different proposition than constantly finding enough for a daily habit at that age.
    A guy I knew who had done heroin once told me that morphine just blew it away, though. Total mind/body disconnect, was the way he put it. Considering he had Crohn's disease, this was quite attractive when the disease was active, probably why he found heroin in the first place.

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras