There's also way more crime than the police have the resources to manage.
My go-to example of this is heroin in the UK: the substance is the most severe level of classification, nobody speaks in its favour even when they regard the war on drugs to be an abject failure ("war on drugs over, drugs declare victory" that kind of thing), yet the number of users of just that one substance exceeds the total UK prison population by a factor of 3.
If you broaden this to all UK users drugs of the same classification, it's around 10 times the total UK prison population. All illegal drugs, 32 times the total UK prison population.
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There's also way more crime than the police have the resources to manage.
My go-to example of this is heroin in the UK: the substance is the most severe level of classification, nobody speaks in its favour even when they regard the war on drugs to be an abject failure ("war on drugs over, drugs declare victory" that kind of thing), yet the number of users of just that one substance exceeds the total UK prison population by a factor of 3.
If you broaden this to all UK users drugs of the same classification, it's around 10 times the total UK prison population. All illegal drugs, 32 times the total UK prison population.
And then there's all the non-drug crimes…