Unprocessed trauma coping circuits (aka addiction) highjacks intelligence to get the dopamine trigger, it doesn’t nessesarily eliminate intelligence.
You don’t solve trauma with cash, but you also don’t make it worse and the benefits to others seem to be greater.
A regulated nervous system is a need, and if someone never developed that capability and doesn’t have awareness or resources to develop it as an adult, it’s actually a pretty logical move to use drugs.
This!! I am always a little disappointed to see so many people on HN talking about gov't programs as though they are some form of altruism. They (usually) are not.
SNAP/WIC/EBT (what people are referring to as food stamps, which I don't think exist anymore; the 'benefits' are managed and distributed via a card provided by JPMorgan last I read) is a corporate welfare program.
Every time there's political talk about cutting the 'food stamp' program, the lobbyists come out. Whose lobbyists? Kraft, Walmart, JPMorgan, et al. If you use your 'Googles' you should be able to find a few articles about what % of revenue the program(s) account for some of these programs. One year Kraft said it was something like 14% (I have this on paper somewhere in my archive, but the info's available on the interwebs). Because of this, these programs aren't going anywhere.
This is also why, when you look at the food stuffs provided to students via school breakfast and lunch programs, they're often crap. Food nutrition is not the goal, getting Vitamin $ to companies (and maybe a few small farmers) is.
Meats and grains are heavily subsidized by the USG, produce not so much. IIRC this goes back to the doing of Nixon's guy, Earl Butz.
I wouldn't assume that, since food stamps aren't particularly focussed on the homeless.
In fact, the original purpose of the food stamp program was clearing agricultural surpluses (hence why the program was created in the Department of Agriculture and not the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare where you would have expected it to be if it were a welfare program and not an ag industry support program); you originally had to purchase food stamps, and for every dollar you got $1 of unrestricted (but still only for food) stamps, and $0.50 of restrictes-to-items-deemed-to-be-in-surplus stamps.
The exact restrictions and mechanisms changed over time in subsequent iterations of the program (and it's hard to find a clear purpose for many changes because lots were compromises between competing visions with fundamentally opposed goals.)