There are certainly other causes of addiction, but at the end of the day a lot of rehab programs fail because even if the addict gets clean, they're immediately sent back to the living situation that got them addicted in the first place. This is especially true for the homeless, "congrats you're free of heroin, now go back to your tent under the bridge where you live in constant fear of rape from other drugged-out homeless people and no employer will touch you! You're free!"

As for "poverty and lack of opportunity" not being a new thing, no shit. But we've seen a hollowing out of the middle class over the past few decades. So a lot of newly impoverished people who grew up middle class, or are else seeing their quality of life decline through no fault of their own. That is relatively new on the scale that we're seeing it.

And I say this as someone who's immediate family has had some past issues with fentanyl addiction, so it's anecdotal, but I'm hardly just speaking from my armchair here.

Opioid addiction has been a spectacularly difficult nut to crack as long as there have been opioids, and highly related issues like alcoholism likewise.

There's a lot of inputs to addiction. You rightly point out the input of economic dignity, which probably is top of the list from a policy standpoint. And on a public policy basis there's also culture, media, simple availability of the drug, availability of interventions, and many other inputs.

But the largest input to addiction is family structure and dynamics, and it's not even kind of close.

It isn't the end of the world if someone becomes addicted to opiates. There are pathways to recovery and one can live a relatively normal life while addicted. What makes it exceptionally harmful is the amount of fentanyl in street drugs, the legal ramifications of use, and the lack of realistic treatment.

Communist revolution.

This is a new low of leftie internet comments, I have to say.

We aren't better you just don't have to look at it.

Real fucking freedom you have there.

Until we fix that problem, the best we can do is to pick systems and ways of organizing that tend to limit the ability of these people to get control.

For a people who won the cold war y'all are very defensive about this whole thing lol. Like the slightest acknowledgement that this system also sucks for a lot of people means we're headed straight for the gulags again.

Adam Smith himself is communist by many modern capitalists' definitions, the label is getting tiresome. They (and possibly you) just want money without any responsibility, a child's idea of a good life.