The thing about drugs is they are actually insanely cheap. You could make a few million doses of meth for a few thousand dollars at the industrial scale. It's the black market and war on drugs that raise the cost, which in turn lead people to steal.
And as others have mentioned, jails are extremely expensive and breeding grounds for more crime in the future.
https://smartdrugpolicy.org/decriminalization-the-portuguese...
The thing about drugs is they are actually insanely cheap. You could make a few million doses of meth for a few thousand dollars at the industrial scale. It's the black market and war on drugs that raise the cost, which in turn lead people to steal.
And as others have mentioned, jails are extremely expensive and breeding grounds for more crime in the future.