Sylvia Choi died in Sydney after taking what is suspected to be ecstasy. A 19-year-old man died in Adelaide after taking a drug yet to be unidentified. Yet despite the calamities of the past week, death by party drug is not normal. It's rare – not rare enough, but far from the most widespread damage wrought by illicit drugs.

That instead comes from addiction to opiates and amphetamines, a destructive circle which feeds violence, dysfunction, abuse and neglect. On this, the federal government seems to be listening to good advice.

Its response to the ice taskforce emphasises treatment, intervention and prevention of harm as a primary way to reduce drug-induced devastation, rather than continuing to peddle the dangerous myth that we can solve the problem by policing people into making better choices – and locking them up when they don't.

The last thing we need is more people in jail. The imprisonment rate across Australia has doubled in 30 years. In 1986, there were 101 people in full-time custody for every 100,000 adult Australians. By 2006, it was 158. Now, it's 196.

The trend is almost uniform across the country. In the past year, the rate in every state and territory bar Victoria is up, with some standouts. The Northern Territory rate remains embarrassingly stratospheric: 882 people per 100,000 population, well above the US rate of 698, notorious for its counter-productive penchant for jailing minorities. Across Australia, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander imprisonment rate is an unforgivable 2244 per 100,000 adults, an enduring shame the nation seems in no rush to fix.

The money it costs to the community to imprison so many people is huge, some $3.4 billion in 2013-14, according to the Productivity Commission, or about $104,000 a year per prisoner on average across the country. The cost of so much human potential going to waste is incalculable.

Part of the reason why the prisons are so full is that courts have become much tougher in the past 20 years – not that you hear much about that. Some crimes deserve jail. Some repeat offenders have exhausted any chance at other options. Sometimes punishment must take priority over someone's efforts at rehabilitation.

But there is objective support for alternatives to jail. A study published on Friday by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research showed no difference in the re-offending rate of those studied between people sent to jail and those given suspended sentences.

It examined 3960 violent offences committed by people who had not been to jail. Of those who went on to re-offend within three years, there was no real difference between those sentenced to jail (43.3 per cent), and those whose terms were suspended (42.3 per cent).

Despite the massive cost to taxpayers, jail was no better at deterring further crime than a suspended sentence.

Surely the way we punish drug addicts provides an opportunity to reduce the damage illicit drugs do to them, and the community.

By diverting funds from imprisonment to intervention, we increase the likelihood of an offender having a lawful future and avoid the disastrous effects on his future from a spell in jail, the finest academy there is for further criminal training.