Be careful.....so called DRUGS vary in type,uses,abuses , ethneogenetics. religion and control..If all u want to do is 'save 'money! chances r  u  r  on the wrong path

This alternative is an improvement to automatic arrest. But underneath this newfound leniency is the belief that the state must criminalize drug use.

When the drug war is over, the only people getting arrested will be criminals of robbery, rape, child abuse, etc. If any of the criminal suspects have drug problems, then that would be a good time for the state to leverage their treatment options while a prison sentence loomed.

To just bust someone for drug possession and force them into treatment or jail means that the crime is the drug. Once you see that, there is an obvious discord with the legality of alcohol, a drug that leads to many thousands of crimes annually and the illegality of most other drugs that by themselves rarely lead to crime.

Maybe you could use  Marijuana as a treatment for their "drug" addiction. That would SAVE  money all by itself.

I think a good regulatory framework for when drugs are legal would be to provide two things for consumers: 1)antidotes, and 2) variations of the same drugs in less potent forms and less potent forms of administration. 

For example, if crack cocaine was legal, consumers should also have the option of less concentrated crack cocaine (dilute it with something to an extreme degree, and sell all the potencies in between), to the point where you can smoke crack and it would be like half a cup of coffee, also provide powder cocaine in all the possible levels of potency, provide oral cocaine in all levels of potency, and provide coca in different forms and degrees potency. Also, plenty of other stimulants would be available, natural ones and pharmaceutical ones, in different forms and levels of potency. When it comes to crystal meth, there's plenty of other amphetamines available, like meth itself in pill form, adderall (which i think is dextroamphetamine or something sounding like it), and even plant based amphetamines like khat and ephedra. There should also be power drinks of all those different sorts (and only the very mild ones would be sold to children). Anyway, this seems potentially hazardous, and it is, but overall i think (and this I admit is a personal subjective philosophy not based on science), that the more alternatives you provide people with, the better decisions they will eventually make (emphasis, admittedly, on the word eventually. but still, even in the beginning, it could be no worse (different perhaps, but not worse), than adulterated drugs sold on the black market where people don't know what they're getting). 

                 Oh, and to add some examples, opium and all sorts of its derivatives all the way up to heroin, and all sorts of different kinds of pot.

The other part of this is the antidotes. To buy opiates you must also buy naloxone (in nasal spray), the antidote for opiate overdoses. You can keep it until it expires or you use it up, but you must show the cashier you have a certain amount of antidote left before he lets you buy the opiate. For cocaine and cocaine based products it is likely they will find an antidote if they put money into research. They already found that for low doses of cocaine, Precedex (a drug used for something else, i don't remember what), is an effective antidote. It seems likely that for high doses it does the same thing (with a correspondinlgy higher dose of precedex, i suppose), and that it should be able to stop an overdose. So again, if precedex is found to work, no one would be able to buy cocaine based products without showing the cashier that they have enough antidote left. 

For marijuana there isn't an antidote, and obviously, there doesn't have to be because it's not going to kill anyone. There is an analogous thing, though: high cbd, low thc strains. I've never tried this as i've never had access to high cbd strains, so i'm speculating here. This might not really work, but i'm throwing it out there because it seems likely to work and also because i want to know what other people think and if anyone has tried it. When it comes to marijuana having the "antidote" should not be mandatory for the consumer, but i do think that all coffeeshops should have it so that people can buy it if they want to (and to promote its use, assuming it works of course). For most people marijuana is not significantly harmful, but for those for whom it is, the problem is essentially bad trips. I've heard in several places that cbd modifies the effects of thc (or rather, they modify each other's effects, probably in combianation with a lot of other cannabinoids), but cbd by itself (in extracted pill form) has been shown to be anxiolitic and antipsychotic, thc is psychedelic and euphoric (and euphoria, as with many other drugs, can sometimes be replaced by anxiety or even panic) (i'm somewhat making this up but this is the way I THINK it works, i'm no cannabinnoid doctor). Strains that have higher cbd are less psychedelic but more relaxing and strains that have lower cbd and high thc are more psychedelic and euphoric, but can are also more likely to cause bad trips. People who are prone to bad trips should have, not only the option of buying buds that have higher cbds and/or lower thcs, but also have the possibility of buying strains that are actually higher in cbd than in thc (and we could have a whole sub-industry of people trying to grow the highest cbd, lowest thc stuff). This would not get anyone high as far as i understand, but it would be great for the more vulnerable ones among us, because it would provide us with a sort of antidote to bad trips. If you know you're vulnerable (as i used to be; i hardly ever smoke pot anymore because of it), you could buy the high cbd stuff and have it handy, get high on the high thc stuff, and if so necessary, smoke the high cbd stuff, thereby modifying the effects, eliminating the bad trip, and averting mental illness. 

I think drug use is all about culture, and the anti-drug should become part of the culture so as to have harm reduction embedded into drug use itself. It would be the best way for society to manage drug use. The perfect anti-drugs are the antidotes and the lower potency stuff.

Why are we allowing police input/intervention in drug policy?  That form of intervention has dismally failed.  Law enforcement has no understanding of pharmacology and don't want to become informed, mostly. When do we require the people who understand pharmacology, the effect of chemicals on the human body, regulate drugs.  Or is that too sane an approach?  Historically we have allowed input from TX providers promoting a religious 12 step approach, police who want to punish users, a prison/industrial structure intent on making money and no doctors or pharmacists.  When will we take a pragmatic look at the issue, criticize and dismiss the current failed drug policy and replace it with effective, humane approaches?  

In other words, fuck the police!