Heroin maintenance programs have been used in some European countries (notably, Switzerland and Great Britain) wit

In a wonderfully informative primer, Why is Marijuana Illegal? A brief history of the criminalization of cannabis, Pete Guither writes:

Year after year, the Supreme Court persisted in completely ignoring the real-life, when confronted with a drug policy issue. Of course, I can't back it up in one post, but - I reviewed dozens of Supreme Court opinions that relate to drug policy and that's the impression that I got. Either Justices preferred to hide their heads in the sand and confine their discussions to arcane legal issues or they professed the same ignorance about the subject matter as, alas, so many Americans - ignorance that is the product of decades of misinformation.