How do you keep a substance illegal, yet decriminalize usage as the report suggests ?  Treatment ?
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I was reading this story about Oxy in the south and the Sheriff said something about not having the man power to save people from themselves.

Opponents of prohibition point to the harms caused and instead advocate "harm minimization", prohibition supporters react to this ideas with scorn.  Perhaps the reason is that they see the harms from prohibition as a good thing as most who suffer the harm belong to minorities that they dislike and against whom they are in the habit of discriminating. Explicit discrimination by via the law has been replaced by implicit discrimination via the biased application of laws against normal human behaviour.

The harms from prohibition are not evenly distributed across all ethnic groups and economic strata. If the children of rich white people were having their lives wrecked by the drug laws at the rate that this is happening to poor Blacks, the policy would not last 5 minutes, but they are not.  Laws criminalizing normal human behaviour such as the use of mind altering substances generate so many breaches that the available resources can only detect and prosecute a tiny fraction. It is thus easy for authorities to bias enforcement towards the usual suspects while society pretends to be unaware of the bias. In fact the bias justifies itself by the fact that statistics on convictions and punishment seem to imply that minorities are of inherently bad character.

I have long suspected that this is how things are firstly from relevant newspaper articles and TV documentaries, and later from internet posts but this kind of evidence is too easily dismissed as anecdotal.  However finally an impressive analyst, Michelle Alexander has written a detailed study including exhaustive documentation of the several strands of how racial malice is channeled and amplified by the criminal justice system, especially its approach to drugs. Her book is titled "The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness".

One of the strands she documents is how the drug war was ramped up starting in the Regan years with an explicitly racist campaign against the Black community, involving reference to crack, crack babies and crack whores, and this at a time when drug use was declining.  An open minded reader of the relevant chapter cannot fail to see that the war against drugs was the counter-attack against Black people for the limited successes of the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s.

When one analyses  the network of causes behind a social problem and finds that the extent of the problem is exactly as one would expect given these causes, one is entitled to assume that advocates of policies resulting in this network of causes want exactly these effects. The history of negro slavery in the US is the prime cause of today's malice by whites against Blacks and the reason the US has inflicted the apparently counterproductive policy of drug prohibition on the rest of the World.