Substance abuse and addiction tends to originate from either a variety of sociological factors, or treatment (self or prescribed). A very large number of addicts are simply self medicating for one reason or another. Or at least they started off that way.
Even if society determines addiction and substance usage to be criminal, it's a victimless crime and a waste of resources.
Apparently the AMA and others disagree:
https://www.centeronaddiction.org/what-addiction/addiction-d...
"Addiction is defined as a disease by most medical associations, including the American Medical Association and the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Like diabetes, cancer and heart disease, addiction is caused by a combination of behavioral, environmental and biological factors. Genetic risks factors account for about half of the likelihood that an individual will develop addiction. Addiction involves changes in the functioning of the brain and body. These changes may be brought on by risky substance use or may pre-exist."
If medicine gets to the point where a single substance or chemical can be easily avoided to entirely prevent diabetes, cancer, or heart disease, the same way that someone can entirely avoid alcoholism by simply not drinking alcohol, that will be quite an achievement.
But this ignores the strong sociological component of addiction and substance abuse. Nobody is choosing to try cancer to self medicate depression, nobody is testing out heart disease to treat their pain or torment, and nobody is giving diabetes a whirl to address a sociological condition.
Bullshit. All kinds of medical conditions and their treatment involve sociological factors. Treating drug abuse as a health issue in no way precludes dealing with its sociological context.
Picking and choose medical conditions that differ markedly from substance abuse and contrasting them is disingenuous. What about other medical conditions that are much more similar such as dietary conditions, overeating disorders, etc? There are a whole range of metabolic diseases caused by or associated with patterns of consumption that are very similar and often even have sociological factors associated with them. These are treated as public health issues. Substance abuse is just another category of related conditions.
Actually, yes, they are. There's no more perfect disease that you could have chosen to disprove your own argument.
Adult-onset diabetes is almost always a variant of substance addiction. It's just that we classify the drug "food" and sell it in the grocery store. But we shouldn't kid ourselves, sugary, highly-processed "foods" are a drug that is intended to be every bit as addictive as alcohol. The sugar high is like being drunk, the subsequent crash is like a hangover and diabetes is like the liver damage that results from alcoholism. The two diseases are remarkably similar.
Well, we do if we want to have a discussion about a particular problem. Using the description from the experts in the subject certainly seems like a good place to start.
You can define food as shards of metal and glass but that means I'm probably not going to take culinary advice from you.
Unless you are an expert, I suggest you follow the guidance of the people who have been studying the subject for almost a hundred years.
Like addiction, all of those can be side effects of things people do for exactly those purposes. In fact, heart disease and cancer are, like addiction, specifically frequently consequences of substance use directed at those purposes (and not just illegal substances; tobacco and alcohol are major culprits.)
Not always, not for the worst drugs out there. Heroin and meth addicts regularly commit violent crimes as a direct result of their addiction. You can say that the actual violence is the crime, but if there is a common root cause for a lot of crimes, doesn't it make sense to criminalize the root cause?
And alcohol, no stranger to huge amount of crime, is still legal. As it should be, but this perfectly shows the hypocrisy around drugs.
It's easy to draw a distinction when physical withdrawal leads to death, but how do you differentiate between physical and psychological pain and suffering when abstaining is not fatal?