Take smoking for example. Even if tabacco its alowed, its really expensive to buy legalized cigarrets.
So peoplo just smoke cheap ones, that enter from Paraguai border, with no quality control, and brougth in Brazil by organized crime, or even produced in clandestine factories.
Just legalizing everything here wold not make a diference.
The point is to NOT treat it as a business, but to treat it as a treatment distribution. You still charge patients for the consumption but you have to lower the production and distribution costs to the point of destroying the ilegal production/distribution and the para-national organizations behind it.
So, like most things government does, intervention with good intentions creates more problems. IMO, government should not interfere with it, and smokers should not get cheap health insurance (or none from government).
Source: https://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/economia/2014/07/04/intern...
Arguably, Portugal doesn't have much control either. They can control their ports but there are no checks of anyone entering from Spain by car and airport security isn't as tight in passport-free Europe as would be intercontinental flights.
Brazil has 15735 km of land frontier with the biggest cocaine and marijuana producers in the world.