If the law doesn't stop, at least it slows it down, and yes, if there were no restrictions it would happen more often, more and more people will fall victim. It's a drug it keeps people from thing straight. Not everyone can control their intake, if fact a very small % can.
Actually a very large amount can and do. The vast majority of drug users are very functioning members of society. Chances are you work with people who use drugs for recreation. Hell chances are a lot of people you know use drugs and you just don't know it.
The vast majority of ODs come from vastly differing purity of the drugs they are getting. You get one batch of heroin that takes X amount to get you high and then you buy another batch and the same amount is a lot stronger and causes you to OD. Legalizing and regulating drugs would completely end that.
I have proof. Recently the government has severely cracked down on the "pill mills", while also making it much more difficult for sick people to get the medicine that they need. They have also twisted the arms of pharma to change the formulations to make them harder to abuse, which also made them less effective for very sick/dying people. It worked great at lowering prescription opiate abuse but had an unfortunate side effect of greatly increasing the use of the closest substitute they could get, heroin. So you took people that were taking pharmaceutical quality drugs, knew exactly how much they were/could take and you sent them into the waiting arms of the heroin dealers who have zero quality controls, even more addictive and you aren't really sure how strong it is. My proof, since this has taken place the number of heroin overdoses has VASTLY increased. Some places have seen 300% increase in heroin overdoses in a single year and the rise is continuing.
So umm, good job government? Restricting supply of illegally abused pharmaceuticals has quite literally caused the problem a lot of people are bitching about. As far as the costs to the hospitals, we spend
FAR more money locking up drug users than we spend treating them medically. All these people calling for locking up drug users are probably the same people that will scream bloody murder when their taxes get jacked way up in order to pay for doubling (or more) our prison system which is already number one in the entire world both by number and per capita.