It's fun to speculate on why that's the case, but it seems likely intractable to nail down.
Although, I'll point out that while they're both categories of addiction, pension funds can only invest in and make profits from the more "innocent-feeling" category.
I'd guess that, if there were a regulatory environment that allowed for public companies that could legally encourage people to indulge their $taboo_addiction, then said $taboo_addiction would cease to be taboo and become more prevalent, for better and worse.
Our society isn't high mobility? Who has a higher mobility?
(* I realise this is the internet but I'm assuming you're talking about one of the five-eyes nations)
I appreciate that’s like one human lifetime and high economic mobility had barely started to come in for e.g. black people before rich people decided to loot the place, but we were headed in the right direction for many decades before this kleptocracy-in-broad-daylight shit kicked in.
And #27 is worse than it sounds, because most people know there are ~200 sovereign states in the word (195 at the moment I believe), and the WEF only has data on 82 of them for this metric (I'm willing to assume that the "no data" ones wouldn't score highly in most cases). So that's "a bit better than halfway up the list", not "clearly competitive with the leaders".
The thing is, we're sort of talking (still somewhat hypothetically) about the Internet becoming more like hard drugs here in terms of entertainment/pleasure/addiction potential, which puts pretty much everyone except for (by HN standards) serious conservatives in a bind on slamming social media: liberals like me and the many libertarians on here usually feel that the War on Drugs has been a catastrophe, alongside pretty much all prohibition aimed at people who are turning to escapism because the rungs of the real-world achievement ladder have been knocked out above them.
I personally believe that explosive growth in escapism (see: opioid crisis) is driven by shitty opportunities in the real world. There is always going to be some set of highly potent diversions, and there will always be some fraction of the population that has a hard enough time with them to need professional help. But IMO none of Internet pornography, painkillers, video games, or crazy-optimized recommender systems are going to destroy lives and societies in job lots if those societies have high mobility in real-word achievement. So, not our society right now.
I'm probably biased having worked in social media in my life, but the flip side is that I also know how how the sausage is made, I think that sort of balances out. Everyone has to form their own opinion here, my point can be TLDR'd as: "decriminalize drugs" and simultaneously "fuck TikTok" isn't really a consistent worldview. It's reasonable to say "fuck marketing TikTok to children" alongside "decriminalize drugs", and I'd probably agree with both.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...