Before the drug wave of the sixties, doctors supplied drug users with the morphine that they required. As young doctors came to view drug dependence as a severe psychological and physical illness, drug dependence became associated with the criminal subculture whose values conflict with those of society. Today, police follow a pathological model in their attack on addiction: dependence is regarded either as an individual illness or as an effect of membership in a criminal subculture. In actuality, heroin consumption has become a systematically organized social phenomenon which is part of society even though it is illegal. Possibilities for drug control under these circumstances are isolation and elimination, decriminalization, and legalization. Elimination would require enormous financial resources to expand police forces, corrections facilities, and border patrols, without great prospects of success. Decriminalization would involve removing sanctions on heroin consumption, registering addicts, and legally dispensing drugs. Many addicts, however, would probably reject the 'conventionality' of such a system. Finally, legalization would mean removal of all legal heroin controls except those affecting purity and distribution licenses. This alternative would eliminate the attractive counterculture lifestyle of the drug scene, leaving control to distributors. The danger, of course, is that many more individuals would be exposed to drug use. It is emphasized that although legalization encounters moral resistance, all alternatives must be discussed before massively expensive isolation measures are undertaken. A 15-item bibliography is supplied. --in German.