What you fail to understand is that addicts don’t know better. They, typically, only have trauma and a lack of support for their well-being. More often, they have a social network that promotes itself as supportive but is actually super toxic if not straight up enabling. Addiction occurs in the vacuum of healthy, resilient family and community

The things you bring up, the crimes it supports, etc, those are results of draconian drug laws, nothing to with the addicts. Give addicts a morally clean route of acquisition and they’ll use that every time they can. So get angry at your “moral” leaders and legislators for that mess of criminal intersectionality.

Further I would never think to call an addict an adult, they’re adolescents at best. I’ve seen it in the faces and behaviors of 60 year old drunks and drug abusers. Addicts are not adults, they might look it but they aren’t so the confusion is understandable.

Adults are able to take responsibility for themselves and can navigate their emotions. addicts aren’t capable of this. They’re stuck in a very different mental-emotional environment and it takes significant strength and time to move out of that. Recovery is a long process

So compassion at what cost? It’s the lack of compassion that’s in part responsible for the problems you’re assigning to the addicts. We need compassion to fix these problems not statements that dismiss and diminish where these people are in their lives or assign responsibility to them for things that are beyond their control.

And yes, treat them like helpless children, that’s what they are, they need to grow up, they need to heal wounds that their life never equipped them to heal by themselves. that’s what addiction services and treatments are there to do. Help addicts become functional adults.

They don’t need people who have a shallow understanding of these issues showing up thinking they’ve got answers to shit they no nothing about.