It’s simply an optimization problem. Prison is horrendously expensive, and people on the street have real externalities for everyone in the area.
If anything the complexity is why it’s an optimization problem.
[1] https://nlihc.org/resource/study-finds-affordable-housing-re...
I believe addiction is a disease, but treatment is elusive. Some have no desire to stop. There are also frequently other mental or emotional problems. Just feeding addiction's most obvious symptom (by continual drug use) does nothing - see this article.
I doubt whether there will ever be a neat and tidy "solution". Eventually the healthy part of society will have enough and some action will be taken, like prohibition or war on drugs, etc. Then it will wax the other way again.
Then imagine you've taken something that infinitely transforms your world and makes you feel amazing to such a degree that's absolutely unimaginable to someone who hasn't tried some of these substances ("better than sex" is an extreme understatement). All your pain is gone, all your misery forgotten, amazing vistas open before you, all is good.
After that brief stay in paradise, you come crashing down and back in to your miserable life. Everything is as before, your passion is back, only you now know it's possible for you to get back to that exalted state, to escape that prison of a life you've been living in, even if for a moment.
Is it evidence of a disease for someone who's gone through this to desperately want to experience that escape again? To be free and feel great?
Is the cause of such a desire -- the misery, the poverty, the hopelessness, the fantastic way these substances make you feel and the escape they offer -- can all that be justly summed up in the word "disease", or is there something else going on?
Many addicts I've known and seen come from stable environments and it isbecause of their incessant drug use that they end up poor, homeless and degraded.
Of course some addicts definitely start in "crushing poverty" but many do not. It affects people from every background, every social strata.
If your hypothesis were correct than the housing and support programs would work. They don't.
Treatment is elusive because it isn't possible in the traditional sense.
The phenomenon is the exploitation of two things: the vulnerability of humans to chemicals, and the inability of communities to protect their free spaces from the outcomes of humans abusing chemicals.
Free spaces are a sacrifice zone. Legalisation of addictive drugs, at scale, will destroy what we value as community.
If we legalised all drugs, we would need to protect our communities, not abandon our communities to people destroying themselves.
Temptative hypothesis 1: People have less roots than in Europe, so they don’t belong somewhere, and have weak ties with close family and no ties with extended family, so they move, and when they fall off their life, there is no social safety net?
Temptative hypothesis 2: Americans classify any bad mood as a mental issue?
Temptative 3: Medical aid is too expensive when you’re, by definition, fallen off at the feet of the social ladder?
Temptative 4: Capitalism separates people? Financial success separates people?
Temptative 5: CIA needed off-network money to fund ISIS, so they traded drugs in Columbia, sold to poor schmocks in Texas, and got the money to pay ISIS? (everyone is a victim here)
Combine that with wealth stratification, Hussle culture, and the complete lack of any real social safety net and if anything I'm surprised we're doing as well as we are.
I don't think it's a single issue by far, but if I had to peg one aspect as the worst offender, it's isolationism. There's strong correlation between drug use, depression, suicide, and lower life expectancy in places with power population density (Alaska, Noth Dakota, pretty much any small rustbelt or mountain or southern town)
When there's nothing to fill the emptiness, people turn to drugs and overeating just to feel something.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2022472118
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States...
The rat in isolation was drawn to the bottle with cocaine water. When the rat was in a cage with activites and other rats, lost the preference for the cocaine water.
Doing drugs in isolation is a coping mechanism, doing drugs with others is social bonding
I recommend you check out reddit r/LateStageCapitalism .
There is so much to be said about how fuck up our world is, I don't wanna start or i'll write a brick.
Elon Musk said recently that school is a joke, and that he do home schooling. Well, he is not the first one to have said it, but he is damn right. Idriss Aberkane has some very good conferences on the subject.
In USA, compared to France, you can add the issue of student debt (slavery). And the city layout being made for cars, public transportation or bikes are scarce, meaning young ones have to heavely rely on parents to do any activitie.
Oh... and your president is not just bad and malevolent, like in France, he is also senile. But like in France, a lot of citizen have voted for him.
Finnaly, who is really sick here ?
"It is not a sign of good mental health to be well adapted to a sick society."