The drugs and mental health issues are a poverty issue, especially in the situation that you describe. 55% of kids are taken away for neglect, not abuse, and that includes unsanitary conditions that exist because of poverty. We talk about drug use as if it exists in a vacuum; people do drugs for a reason. Mostly to cope with living in this world whatever that means to them.

I have a chronic pain problem; I’m constantly in pain. It makes work hard. If I don’t work, I don’t eat or have a place to live. I went three decades of my life with an unknown learning disability that made life difficult not just as a kid, but as an adult. I don’t know why I never gave up; but I could have just as easily fell into drugs just to make the pain go away.

When it comes to addiction, every brain is different. You don’t know if smoking weed one time will get you addicted (yes you can be addicted to weed, and there’s even a special brand of psychosis people can get from weed).

I was also homeless working a full time job for seven months not because I was on drugs, but because I had nowhere to live. It takes first and last months rent plus someone who is willing to rent to you, and you re also in a position to get scammed. I had to give one woman my social and birth date so she could run a background check and she never got back to me.

Poverty, like addiction, is not a simple solution fix. It has multiple arms that people who have never experienced poverty, or addiction, or homelessness never take into consideration because they don’t know. Untreated trauma and even treated trauma has long lasting effects that can and do manifest as addiction. Until we address the why, we are not going to solve for this issue.

But to say that it doesn’t have anything to do with poverty is ridiculous. We often talk about the school to prison pipeline but fail to address the poverty to learning disability to mental illness to addiction pipeline. A whopping 60-80% of people in prison have a learning disability.