[Weatebob]

The drug is not the problem.

The social net / missing social network is.

Our society struggles to take care of its own people because we live in a mentally restraint.

Even in Germany were you have a right for a basic living like a flat and heat and foot and electricity we have homeless.

And no we don't spend the money a flat and everything would cost us into alternative 'equivilent' like enough street worker / social help for them.

People with good choices and support primarily choose non self harming activities.

Everyone else should get proper professional care.

[heresie-dabord]

> The drug is not the problem. \n The social net / missing social network is.

The drug is the problem, and so are the suppliers -- they are killing people. Addicts and people who need psychiatric care are harming themselves. If the criminal suppliers were supplying contraband woolen socks instead, there might only be a trade dispute and a loss of retail tax income.

That said, users of harmful drugs fall into two sacrifice zones: SZ1) the purveyors of the harmful drugs don't care much if you die, and SZ2) the rest of society doesn't care if you die, but doesn't want you dying in a business district.

Government is willing to be in some "dealing" businesses, such as tobacco and alcohol, because by far most users of these substances can keep working and paying taxes. The economic advantage of government involvement is clear.

There is only so much that the levels of government will invest to reduce (palliate) the suffering of users of harmful drugs. Local government is directly motivated to not have its community (revenue base) supplanted by drug zones. Citizens don't want that either. So the minimal mitigation is what you would expect.

When we say something is a social problem, we often mean that we wish humans were kinder to humans.

[CapstanRoller]

Prohibition doesn't work, and has never worked.

>The economic advantage of government involvement is clear.

Does this also include the prison-industrial complex?

[rayiner]

> People with good choices and support primarily choose non self harming activities.

That’s not true. People in the west have so many more choices than people in my dad’s village in Bangladesh. But it’s people in the west who are destroying themselves with drug and other vices.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I think you’re speaking too broadly and applying it to all of Americans. America has the capacity for shocking levels of poverty and economic entrapment.

Additionally, just from a cursory google, it looks like addiction is also on an alarming rise in Bangladesh, especially in the youth. I don’t see evidence addiction is isolated to “the West”.

[rayiner]

No poverty I’ve seen in America is shocking to me. I remember sleeping in my dad’s village with hurricane lamps at night because at that point (late 1980s) they didn’t have electricity. By your logic, people would be killing themselves left and right because they were so poor and life was so hard. But poverty isn’t what causes drug addiction.

Addiction is rising in Bangladesh—but as it’s getting richer and more westernized. But even then, to put it into context, the drug overdose rate in the US is 20 times higher adjusted for population.

[agumonkey]

I'd go even further, modern society is an anti-safety net. It seems the nicest way to live is to get slightly away from most of urban life as thought since post-ww2 era.

[Fricken]

Deaths of despair in the US are highest amongst rural white men. (Urban white men aren't too far behind.)

[agumonkey]

Sorry I didn't mean to go full farming. Just middle sized, near country side, villages lifestyle.

[krapp]

Modern American society is anti safety net. The rest of the modern world seems to accept the premise just fine.

[agumonkey]

USA might be above others but even in France and other western countries I sense a similar sense of senseless running around toxic everything and the state struggles to maintain protections since problems accrete.

[wintermutestwin]

>The drug is not the problem. >The social net / missing social network is.

Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park