I was never heavy into drugs but I smoked weed a fair bit in my 20s, knew a lot of other daily users of weed as well as some harder drugs. I don’t think I ever came across a person that randomly decided to do drugs for no reason one day and got hooked. They were all people who had pretty messed up problems in their life that were too complex for them to fix on their own.
So it confuses me when people instantly assume that someone is in a bad situation due to drugs rather than them using drugs to deal with a bad situation. And yes I know drug abuse makes problems worse the vast majority of the time but it’s not what I see as the root issue in a lot of cases, the drug use is a symptom/coping mechanism for people that society have let fall through the cracks.
it’s the narrative pushed by the government, and most people are insufficiently wary of the stories they are told by the powers that be.
if people abuse drugs because of a history of generational and personal trauma at the hands of racist, capitalist, i and imperialist forces, then the obvious answer is to counter those forces. if people abuse drugs because they’re just bad people who make bad decisions as part of an immutable personal failing, it is far easier to justify criminalizing drug use, imprisoning drug users, and using them as slave labor to fuel the machine.
at least, that’s definitely what’s going on in the US.