A summary of how addicition is actually a problem related to lack of conneciton. Share your thoughts. Would love to discuss.
When one doesn't know how (or is systematically unable) to connect with other humans and build meaningful relationships, they will find something, ANYTHING, that they can connect to and make them feel okay.
Even if you've never tried drugs or alcohol (which is mind blowing to me), you can probably think of a time when this type of relationship has developed with food, shopping, television, or whatever other form of consumption you partake in.
The fact that people hold drug users solely accountable for their habits is insanity. When a seed doesn't grow properly, you change the conditions around the seed, opposed to the seed itself. You don't blame the seed and get mad at it for being a bad seed. Same concept. To build on that, when a plant grows unhealthily for a long time, it is HARD to bring them back to life. Same with addiction. When a human is so broken inside that they essentially create hell on earth and lock themselves in their own mind prison, change is HARD.
Blaming the drugs themselves or drug dealers is also unfair. Every drug (or anything else) is here on Earth to serve a purpose. It executes that purpose. Period. Calling it inherently negative is simply imposing your mental conceptions of the thing on to the thing (even if there appears to be consensus among the masses). Some might even say that all drugs can actually be positive if the proper meaning is inspiring their use. In regards to the drug dealers, they are simply meeting a need in a market. There is a high demand, and it's MAD LUCRATIVE.
I look forward to the day where humans value connection over money, giving over consumption, and love over power.
I totally agree. I've been studying my own addictions and coming to the conclusion that it does have something to do with my cage. It also has to do with the external reality not matching my internal one. I have creative visions of humans getting along and ceasing their need to dominate others. Until resources are more evenly distributed, however, i don't think this is possible.
I agree with your 4th paragraph about how hard change is. People with these problems should still be considered responsible for their actions unless they can be shown (to within some reasonable margin of error) to be mentally incompetent, but we should be less hard on them than we are. A lot of people seem not to understand basic concepts related to mental illnesses, so there's probably also a lot of ignorance, confusion, and fear about addiction. Better local education would really help, and there should be more work and social opportunities for people who recover from addiction or reform after criminal activity.
I don't know whether or not everything is "here on earth to serve a purpose." That's a more general philosophical idea, so I'd have to think about it. ;)
Yes, drug dealers are responding to a need in the market, but because current governments have forced this to be a black market, a lot of the dealers are also doing things like assaults, murders, blackmailing, etc. Having moral qualms about this and not wanting to deal with it is understandable. There's also the fact that someone can sell something known to be physically addictive with the goal of getting people addicted in order to make more money.