AFAIK improving on poverty is a more effective approach.
The poverty is not the cause, it is the symptom of the system’s rot. Especially when you compare other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems and less crime. Drug addiction is not cheap.
The irony is that your very perspective is the very kind of mentality that has led to the circumstances where we can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to, while the powerful and rich simply do a cost benefit analysis of it because of that and conclude it is easier to, e.g., import replacements for the humans that have been destroyed by drugs and mental illness, which then also drives down the wages/salaries, and drives up the costs of living and drives up the profits of the rich you blame. It’s a kind of “the blind men and an elephant” problem. You keep scratching at the scabs of your self-inflicted cuts, but they don’t seem to be healing.
It really always astonished me that even here, in a community of people in a domain where logic is necessary there is still this stranglehold of irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma.
Wanting an increase in carceral solutions despite the weight of evidence against their effectiveness is exactly the "irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma" you're railing against. It doesn't feel fair to a certain worldview to allocate resources in this way. But you need to get over that, because it is what works.
Also it’s absolutely not prevailing in America. Especially in a European sense.
But even when you push to a good direction, it can be misleading. Like Portugal legalised hard drug usage, but they slashed funds of organisations helping to drug addicts. Of course, you will have a problem after a while (and they have now), even when decriminalisation is a good step. But politicians can pretend that that’s the “prevailing view”, while they just make some pretexts to point their finger to the “prevailing view”.
That’s pretty meaningless. Distribution what matters. For example https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.