Well, you have psychological and physiological addiction. Normal "happy" people get addicted all the time - we've seen that with prescription drugs. That's almo

Well, you have psychological and physiological addiction. Normal "happy" people get addicted all the time - we've seen that with prescription drugs. That's almost purely a physiological addiction. But of course, those two are not mutually exclusive - you can have both forms of addiction, and they do often merge into one with many types of drugs. Even if you beat extremely physiologically addictive drugs, you can lust for the effects many years / decades later, because of how good they made you feel. And as you become addicted, usually at the expensive of everything else in your life, depression will set in - which just amplifies the need to escape. The big problem with homelessness, and those types of drug users, is that a solid chunk of them have underlying mental illnesses - which may have lead to the drug use (self medication), or came out after drug use. These are the type of patients that simply can't function on their own. If you give them a free apartment, they're not able to live there. I don't think radical decriminalization is the root problem - but rather the utter lack of (mental) healthcare.