>perception of drug addicts as weak and deserving of their fate

I think you're right but the reasoning is one step removed from the conclusion.

Drug addition is a poor people problem (in part because it takes resources and support to break the cycle).

Opiod (and meth for that matter) addiction skews rural and therefore white.

A lot of people take the attitude that poor rural white trash are poor white trash because they live in a dying town with no industry and refuse to relocate to somewhere they can more easily scrape by. The catch is that the people making these judgements generally have a very different set of values than the people they're judging.

When you take the attitude that the situation that leads one to easily become an addict is the fault of the addict then it's hard to have sympathy for addicts.

There's also a lot of (well meaning) "optimism to the point of stupidity" in assessing how effective firearms legislation is as an avenue to reduce violent crime and how easy it is to make a driver-less car that can effectively share the roads with vehicles operated by people