It’s an easy, comforting answer.

“That person’s life sucks because they do drugs” doesn’t raise any uncomfortable questions, and it makes avoiding a similar situation seem easy. “That person is using drugs because their life sucks” leads us to ask why their life sucks and whether the same thing could happen to us.

To answer your question, because they’ve never done drugs. people who blame the problem you describe solely on drugs don’t know anything about drugs, except that they’re scary and they hurt you.

Because fixing the PROBLEMS means the people in charge lose money to build functional, supportive social structures.

Much easier to throw victims in jail and monetize their “treatment” by privatizing poor people’s tax dollars.

A simple explanation of a complex problem

The problems causing drug abuse reflects on the speaker’s treatment of people and the people close to them, it makes them responsible for the fallout of their actions or lack of action.

Blaming the user absolves themselves of any responsibility.

You can apply that to pretty much any social ills, like poverty, homelessness, etc.

IOW, the person blaming the user: may have abused the user in some way as a kid, voted to end substance abuse education in schools, voted to end afterschool programs that might’ve kept kids away from abusive situations or drugs in the house, voted to limit or end food programs that would have allowed people to not become completely destitute and take to drugs for escape, and so on.

Those who want to control us need a boogeyman to point at, one that is NOT themselves.

Ultimately, this is the reason.

Not necessarily a proper answer, but…

Captain Ketamine is supposedly worth over $2 trillion…

Because you live in Usonia.

This certainly isn’t the case with my country,
the Netherlands, where the problem is considered one of regulation
or with China, where the problem is considered one of national security and imperialism.

Because people don’t understand what they haven’t experienced. Like, at all.

Amplification - drugs /can/ turn a small problem into a huge one.

Plus sometimes people do start drugs for temporary or even trivial reasons - boredom, curiosity, peer pressure, even just availability - they don’t always need to be escaping something.

When they say drugs ruin lives, it’s a truism often enough to be accurate.

Can’t that be the same for other things? Drugs, violence, guns, gangs, etc.

Nobody should want to do those things with a healthy mindset.

First order effects easy to see, second order causes harder to see

Rugged individualism and idealism. We have long been conditioned to view these things as a personal moral failure rather than the inevitable result of social pressures. Mainly because this is more convenient for our masters.

We don’t deal with the root cause because it’s expensive, time consuming, complex and some people will get offended (ie: most of our problems are a result of bad parenting - adulting not knowing how to regulate themselves, adults being too exhausted from work, adults not knowing how to mirror etc. ). Symptoms are what’s treated. Ie: in the us the focus is on getting you back to work/ be productive and not solving your depression, anxiety whatever.

We all have our coping mechanisms. And without any doubt some of them are healthy and most of them are bad… And some of them will actively kill you.
Drugs is in the last two categories.
Tbh I think weed is a terrible drug, killing motivation and clouds thinking - but it is a step above alcohol. And should be legal.
What we need to have a social network where nobody needs to turn to drugs, but realistically it’s not going to happen.