Many of the personal problems you mention are caused by the war on drugs itself. Of course taking opiates and other hard drugs for recreation is a terrible idea

Many of the personal problems you mention are caused by the war on drugs itself. Of course taking opiates and other hard drugs for recreation is a terrible idea, but the consequences are made incredibly worse by the cost and low quality of the drugs, and then by throwing addicts in prison (see the study "Rat Park" for why this is a terrible idea) and denying them any sort of job prospects. Pharmaceutical-grade hard drugs could be dirt cheap, and probably many addicts could leave mostly normal lives while taking them. In fact Sweden is trying this approach with success. It's an approach based on rational scientific thinking instead of (mostly religiously inspired) puritanism. In Portugal this is also what worked -- "Methadone clinics" are just providing an opiate replacement that is less harmful. A lot of people who are proud of their "right choices" fail to realize that they have been lucky. Raised in the wrong environment, maybe they would have made worse choices. The war on drugs perpetuates and expands the wrong environments. Alcohol is a hard drug by any modern scientific standard, and Europe is fairly liberal about it. It is highly addictive, it destroys your health and one can overdose on it. And yet nobody is pushing for prohibition of alcohol or denying treatment for alcoholism. Why? Because it is socially accepted (most people drink it at least occasionally) and because alcohol prohibition has been famously tried in the US with catastrophic results. Why would other hard drugs be any different?