Or rather Foucault's criticism of the welfare state owes less to Marx than Weber & liberalism -- hence the resemblance between him and a Glasser at times -- though Foucault rejects the liberal conception of rights-bearing persons. I think we can & should argue against (A) drug treatment as an alternative sentence to imprisonment & say that (B) decriminalizing drugs & offering free drug treatment as a service, not a sentence, are better political reforms. I'm not sure, however, that Foucault would have thought that (B) would make the state any less offensively "therapeutic" than (A), for Foucault's criticism of biopolitics & governmentality applies indiscriminately both to (A) and (B). Based upon a Foucauldian critique, one might as well say that mass immunization of children is an instance of the egregiously "therapeutic state," a sign of the growth of biopolitics & governmentality; recall that _Discipline and Punish_ begins the chapter titled "Panopticism" with an analysis of the seventeenth-century management of the plague.
Yoshie