> if someone wants to do drugs they should honestly reconsider their life and do something productive I think this is a problematic way to frame the situation.

> if someone wants to do drugs they should honestly reconsider their life and do something productive I think this is a problematic way to frame the situation. If we zoom out a bit to look at systemic factors, a significant portion of drug use stems from other situations in a person’s life. People commonly start using/seeking out forms of mental escape from these circumstances. This also runs us immediately into the question of what type of drugs are we talking about? I’ve seen elsewhere you’ve said this is just about the hard stuff, but that then points us directly back to systemic factors. Declaring that someone should have just tried harder to make better life choices seems a bit like telling a depressed person they just need to start feeling better. I’d be more interested in focusing on ways we can help people past their need for drugs in the first place. Research on Psylocibin-assisted therapy in particular looks extremely promising and an increasingly important area of focus. As a thought experiment, it’s interesting to wonder what would have happened if research into psychedelics wasn’t set back an entire generation. Where would the world be in terms of mental health and trauma recovery? How many people who turned to hard drugs could have chosen a better option? I’m not saying people shouldn’t be responsible for their life choices, but responsibility and causality are different things.