zlacker

> In my experience, having watched friends enter that position, it's drugs which cause drug addiction. Mental health might play a factor, but if I gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, their brain chemistry would be almost irreversibly changed and would spend years, if not the rest of their life, wanting more. Same goes for powerful opioids.

I bet if you gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, almost certainly nothing would change except their toilet flushing slightly more frequently!

My point was not about basic mechanism of dependence which sure will happen to anybody. It was about what causes them to seek out and take those things in excess in the first place.

> One can argue that certain people are more predisposed to enjoy being high, I'm one of those people. When you see incredibly rich and successful people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Chris Farley, and Philip Seymour Hoffman ultimately losing it all to that desire, I feel like it's hard to blame something like lack of opportunity or government welfare dependence.

Individual cases and especially these extreme outliers are no good. It's not that one single government policy or social problem is the cause of all drug addiction, but they could contribute to the issue on a population level.