Yes, if you conditions that will produce chronic excruciating pain for the rest of your life, and you've got the political clout of major drug companies behind you, then you can take their massively addictive pain killers for the rest of your life - at their obscene prices, or you can be charged with a "major felony" for your "massively criminal behavior" of actually taking care of yourself.
The "massive" majority of people in prison due to the war on drugs are not the leaders of the cartels, not their wholesalers, not their distributors and not their sellers, but they are the victims of the pushers, the addicts who, tyring to save a few bucks on their addiction will buy more than the legally mandated "possession" quantity and then get a second conviction for selling added to their conviction for possession.
The war on drugs has produced nohting better than what came from the war on liquor - prohibition.
The US had a major opium/heroine epidemic from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. It was essentially wiped out, with massive education, public relations and civic affairs programs, both in the schools and to the general public, and with treatment for addicts - not massive arrests. It was after that epidemic was nearly wiped out that drug control laws began to be enacted; as if they would solve an issue that was already being resolved.
There is an article on the USDOJ website which backs that up:
In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal — and, like some drugs today, seen as benign medicine not requiring a doctor's care and oversight. Addiction skyrocketed. There were over 400,000 opium addicts in the U.S [my notes: ¹The article attributed much of this figure to addicted Civil War veterans. ²The census in 1880 was ~50,000,000, which = a 0.8% addiction rate]. By 1900, about one American in 200 [=0.5%] was either a cocaine or opium addict.
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/demand/speakout/06so.htm
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My calculations show that opiate addiction dropped from 0.8% in 1880 to at least 0.5% in 1900. That is at least a 37.5% reduction. If you toss out cocaine addicts included in the 1900 figure, the drop would be even greater. Now on to 2000:
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"There were an estimated 980,000 hardcore heroin addicts in the United States in 1999, 50 percent more than the estimated 630,000 hardcore addicts in 1992."
--www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/heroin.htm
"The demand for both powdered and crack cocaine in the United States is high. Among those using cocaine in the United States during 2000, 3.6 million were hardcore users who spent more than $36 billion on the drug in that year."
--http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/794/cocaine.htm
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Using year 2000 figures from the USDOJ, and a population of 285,000,000, the rate of addiction to either cocaine or heroin is about 1.5%, or triple the rate in 1900.
As an ironic side note, the title of the USDOJ article is, "Legalization has been tried before, and failed miserably".