An excellent book on the topic of drug abuse is Gabor Mate's, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. He makes a convincing argument that the majority of drug users are

An excellent book on the topic of drug abuse is Gabor Mate's, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. He makes a convincing argument that the majority of drug users are struggling with severe early trauma. Given this study and Mate's book, it may just be that traumatized people are looking for ways to forget. They could be seeking the forgetfulness as exactly what they want. This is different from saying that memory loss is necessarily a bad, unintended consequence.