There is a reason humans evolved morality to regulate bad behavior. Morality helps you resist your base desires and do what is better for yourself and the group in the long term.

Do people become addicts because of moral failing? In some (many?) cases, yes. Not all, and not undeserving of treatment/help to recover in any case.

Fascinating how often it gets subverted by a portion of the group though.

One of my favorite lines of the Bible are these simple words from Jesus Himself: "They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick." It turns out that most of us are more like the Pharisees that Jesus railed against: convinced of our own moral superiority. I think that's a natural instinct of human nature (independent of one's professed religious beliefs).

Even that I'm on the fence about. It can be perfectly appropriate to punish people for making poor choices while at the same time helping them overcome some of the natural consequences of those choices.

I don't know where I stand on the issue of incarcerating people for drug use. But on its face I am not opposed to putting people in jail for selling highly addictive substances to young kids. This is one issue I have with the pro-legalization theory. Alcohol absolutely destroys lives (my grandmother drank herself to death when my mom was 13 in order to have some mental escape from the physical abuse of my alcoholic grandfather). Prohibition didn't seem to work very well, but general acceptance also seems to be failing.

It's a complicated issue, and I don't know where I stand on every aspect of it. But on its face I don't think punishment and help are mutually exclusive. And the fear of punishment _can_ be an effective deterrent. (Education being, in my opinion, the best deterrent. I've never had a drop of alcohol both because of my religious beliefs and the growing understanding that I'm very likely a drunk trapped in a sober body.)

> It can be perfectly appropriate to punish people for making poor choices while at the same time helping them overcome some of the natural consequences of those choices.

Then we are still not talking about the same kind of punishment. I refer more to "they did this to themselves and have it coming" types of attitudes, of the self-serving moral outrage kind[0]. Which is not the kind of "tough love" you are talking about.

[0] http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/01/moral-outrage-is-self-serv...