Sullum on Vancouver's latest "free" drug program

Reason's Jacob Sullum has some thoughts on the most recent innovation in Vancouver's ongoing attempt to socialize drug abuse:

Vancouver, which already has "a free needle exchange, a methadone maintenance program, a drug injection site where nurses supervise as heroin addicts shoot up, and a clinical trial testing whether chronic opiate addicts can be helped with prescribed heroin," is now experimenting with "maintenance treatment" for stimulant addicts. Under the new program, reports The Globe and Mail, heavy users of cocaine and methamphetamine will receive oral doses of legally prescribed stimulants in the hope that they "might decrease their use of illegal drugs and improve their social and physical health." Both of those outcomes are plausible, assuming the "patients" stop injecting, snorting, or smoking black-market drugs and start swallowing legal, quality-controlled pills instead.

[. . .] More troubling is the Vancouver model of free needles, free methadone, free heroin, and free amphetamines, all courtesy of the taxpayers. This strikes me as exactly the wrong way to achieve drug policy reform, guaranteed to alienate people who might be willing to let others use drugs but don't want to pick up the tab for it. The message should be freedom coupled with responsibility, not government-subsidized drug addiction.

It's certainly better than treating all drug users with penalties and punishments prescribed by the full majesty of law, but he's quite correct that it's shifting the burden from the drug users to the non-drug using through redistributive taxation. Surely it's immoral to require radical anti-drug warriors to pay taxes which support something completely opposed to their own beliefs?