> The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?).
Isn't that still treating a symptom, rather than the core problem? If homelessness is caused by drug addiction, what causes drug addiction? Underlying mental health? Lack of opportunity? Government welfare dependence?
I think if we could treat that, we'd also know the core problem.
My hunch (not as an expert) is that people who are very prone to addiction have a maladapted brain system of some kind. I think this system 'malfunction' can either be genetic and/or caused by trauma/environmental reasons in their life. I suspect this because nearly everyone I know that has had addiction problems has had a parent with similar. It's surprisingly rare to find someone with an addiction problem that isn't in the family. Strangely, not all siblings seem to have the same issue.
Problem is, we don't know which system(s) it is yet. The research on kappa opioid receptors is very interesting as the KOR regulates stress response, and we know that stress causes many relapses in previously addicted individuals in recovery.
I also think we may find there are multiple types of addiction, caused by different systems/reasons. These all present very similarly, but similar to the discovery years ago that some infections were caused by viruses and some bacteria, it could be similar for addiction.
So really I think it goes something like this:
People are predisposed to addiction -> they become addicted -> they become homeless and trapped in a chaotic loop which a tiny percent of people can recover from
When I believe the best response for people that are affected by addiction would be something like this
Addicted person (homeless or otherwise) -> some sort of diagnostic (genetic testing?) -> new tailored medication -> recovery
It may be also these maladaptations cause all the mental health problems themselves. But not everyone that has mental health problems becomes addicted, despite experimenting with substances.
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.
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.
The "bad" drugs, crack/meth/opioids/etc. make your brain feel a way sober-type people can't really imagine. I don't know what the answer is.
Not like people in other countries don't have access to the same drugs. It's not solved 100% anywhere, but the magnitude is very different in say Canada.
End of the day, it's still societal issues that's causing some people to go down this path. Most of the drug addicts have some level of "atypical" upbringing. Maybe abusive childhood, constant foster care, growing up in a bad neighborhood with the wrong influence etc. Seems like we should be focusing on solving those issues, which not only benefits the topic at hand but society and communities in general.
I don't think this is true. "Only" a quarter of people that try heroin become addicted. Similar numbers with alcohol (15% of people that try alcohol develop a problem with it), but given alcohol is more widespread, there is some selection bias because only a subset of people try heroin, whereas nearly everyone tries alcohol. I would not be surprised if the overall addiction risk is very similar between alcohol and heroin.
I think it's much more likely some sort of genetic trait underlying it.
> 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.
Isn't that still treating a symptom, rather than the core problem? If homelessness is caused by drug addiction, what causes drug addiction? Underlying mental health? Lack of opportunity? Government welfare dependence?