See Johann Hari's TED talk
for more on this.I think the theory of connection is very important and relevant. Vice or virtue -- the determination of either is essentially subjective, but society, manifested in the form of organized governments, is applying arbitrary, normative criteria to individual behavior and criminalizing what they don't like.
Regarding disease, the point, made more eloquently by the authors in the articles I cited, is that it is an abuse of the word to apply it to substance abuse. If I have heart disease, diabetes or hepatitis C, it matters not what my social context is, I have a dysfunction. The cause and effect are clear. The articles refuting the brain disease model of addiction I linked to attempt to distinguish between addiction as disease and addiction as a set of behaviors arising in a social context. I was persuaded of the later approach...
So, yes, this is a social issue. I am no philosopher, but if we consider the necessity of human beings to live in society (see "Harmonies of Political Harmony" by Frédéric Bastiat https://archive.org/details/HarmoniesOfPoliticalEconomyBookOneFredericBastiat), we can see how governments have evolved. The point at which government asserts a right that no individual in society possesses i.e., the right to control what we possess and consume, then that government has gone astray and is abusive of the principles of society. It destroys the fundamental reasons that people collaborate in society for their mutual advantage.
The War on Drugs is definitely a social issue, one that the powers that be have latched onto and perverted to increase their "jurisdiction".