Yeah I've seen the destruction that comes from removing legal/social consequences for drug abuse. Neglected and abandoned children is by far the most tragic. The community of non-addicts bears the responsibility for cleaning up the destruction, the addicts themselves cannot. That's the nature of addiction. To be clear I'm talking about the hard drugs; opiates, cocaine, meth.
I believe addiction is a disease, but treatment is elusive. Some have no desire to stop. There are also frequently other mental or emotional problems. Just feeding addiction's most obvious symptom (by continual drug use) does nothing - see this article.
I doubt whether there will ever be a neat and tidy "solution". Eventually the healthy part of society will have enough and some action will be taken, like prohibition or war on drugs, etc. Then it will wax the other way again.
Imagine you are suffering day in and day out in crushing poverty, that you see nothing but crime and hopelessness all around you, that your friends and family have been killed or are rotting away in jail, that you are looked down upon, spat upon, and despised, that you see no hope of bettering or escaping your situation.
Then imagine you've taken something that infinitely transforms your world and makes you feel amazing to such a degree that's absolutely unimaginable to someone who hasn't tried some of these substances ("better than sex" is an extreme understatement). All your pain is gone, all your misery forgotten, amazing vistas open before you, all is good.
After that brief stay in paradise, you come crashing down and back in to your miserable life. Everything is as before, your passion is back, only you now know it's possible for you to get back to that exalted state, to escape that prison of a life you've been living in, even if for a moment.
Is it evidence of a disease for someone who's gone through this to desperately want to experience that escape again? To be free and feel great?
Is the cause of such a desire -- the misery, the poverty, the hopelessness, the fantastic way these substances make you feel and the escape they offer -- can all that be justly summed up in the word "disease", or is there something else going on?
This is a fantasy, a romance. It very little resembles the reality I've seen.
Many addicts I've known and seen come from stable environments and it isbecause of their incessant drug use that they end up poor, homeless and degraded.
Of course some addicts definitely start in "crushing poverty" but many do not. It affects people from every background, every social strata.
If your hypothesis were correct than the housing and support programs would work. They don't.
I come from a developing country, and I agree. very often, the people consuming drugs come from a stable socioeconomic background from middle to upper class. When my family and I lived in a poor neighborhood, we didn’t notice anyone with an addiction problem, Perhaps one well-known case, at most. Once we started to move into wealthier, neighborhoods, however, it became far more visible.
> I believe addiction is a disease, but treatment is elusive.
Treatment is elusive because it isn't possible in the traditional sense.
The phenomenon is the exploitation of two things: the vulnerability of humans to chemicals, and the inability of communities to protect their free spaces from the outcomes of humans abusing chemicals.
Free spaces are a sacrifice zone. Legalisation of addictive drugs, at scale, will destroy what we value as community.
What if we make treatment basically consist of some sort of genetic or other biotechnological intervention that essentially tweaks the vulnerability? Can't be worse than a jail + thousands of never-terminating under any circumstance collateral penalties.
Someone elsewhere in this HN discussion compared the support of people destroying themselves with drugs to being like providing hospice (palliative) care.
If we legalised all drugs, we would need to protect our communities, not abandon our communities to people destroying themselves.
The trick is to not assume that "feeding" it will solve it but to create alternative actions, doing research to do so while enduring the destruction patiently for as long as that takes.
I believe addiction is a disease, but treatment is elusive. Some have no desire to stop. There are also frequently other mental or emotional problems. Just feeding addiction's most obvious symptom (by continual drug use) does nothing - see this article.
I doubt whether there will ever be a neat and tidy "solution". Eventually the healthy part of society will have enough and some action will be taken, like prohibition or war on drugs, etc. Then it will wax the other way again.