Having personally witnessed the effects of dope usage on others, I can quite confidently say that dope is just as harmful as excessive alcohol consumption. Paranoid schizophrenia as a result of smoking weed is not something you'd want to live with. Likewise the prevalence of alcohol abuse needs to be addressed and this should start with raising the legal age to 25 (not 20 or 21) as this is regarded as being the age where brain development is completed. Also, we should abolish suburban liquor stores, 440ml beer and RTD drinks, high alcohol products such as absinthe and the advertising of alcohol outright.
Alcohol - not cannabis, ecstacy or methamphetamine - is by far the most problematic recreational drug in this country. It's involved in half of all violent offences, 46% of sexual assaults, 33% of overall offences, 20% drownings, and over 500 serious and fatal road crashes every year. It causes brain damage, organ damage and heart disease. It kills more than 1000 New Zealanders and is described by the Ministry of Justice as a "significant factor" in 22,000 incidents of family violence annually. No illegal drug comes even close to matching the harms - violence, injury, disease, death - caused by this one legal drug. A pragmatic solution to reducing the significant harms inflicted on society by policies which have only legally permitted adults to use this one, very harmful, drug can be found in the book 'Marijuana is Safer - So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?' by Steve Fox, Paul Armentano and Jason Tvert. The foreword alone, by the former Chief of the Seattle Police Dept, gives one a lot to think about on this matter.
If your illness is alcohol/drug related and self induced,you should to pay for treatment and that treatment should attract a large premium and that then may act as a sober reminder not to over indulge in drunken/druged moronic behaviour,as why should responsable people be picking up the tab for dickheads?