That sounds plausible. While wanting to get better is a good incentive, the threat of going to jail is a good incentive as well.
Ues, but of course, for millions of addicts, the threat of going to jail means nothing, as evidenced by continued illegal drug use, even among those who have been in jail and should have learned the hard way.
Many addicts don’t care about anything. Not even their own lives.
Looking back at the OP, the question did not center solely on drug abuse. The question was, how much blame should we assess to poor people for their poverty, as opposed to exterior conditions imposed on them by their society.
To me it’s very obvious that varying societies vary in how responsible they are for their members’ poverty. It’s a lot harder to escape poverty if you are born an ordinary person in the Democratic Republic of the Congo than if you are born an ordinary person in Norway, in fact, in Norway it’s probably rather difficult to become extremely poor. The United States is somewhere between these two extremes. We’re a lot closer to Norway than we are to Congo, but that’s no cause for bragging as the Congo sets an EXTREMELY low bar.
I’d say that most people who wish to place most responsibility for poverty on the poor are just trying to evade the social responsibility for poverty. Ideally, you want all nations to be like Norway in this respect: creating conditions that make poverty difficult to experience. Extreme poverty is a shame to all who live in a society, but MOST ESPECIALLY its leadership. It bespeaks a want of both morality and capability. Our leaders are failures, to the extent that poverty is increasing in American. And it is.
As for the druggies, sure, all the evidence indicates rehabilitation works better than incarceration. But it’ll be hard to change that with the for-profit prison industry wanting their prisoners and the large corporations that they farm prison labor out to wanting their slaves.
We can agree that a wealthy society has a responsibility to alleviate poverty. We can still say that people are responsible for their outcomes in life. There is no conflict here, and I actually think enabling bad behavior by making excuses for it is where the conflict is. You can’t help the poor if you don’t hold them responsible for their actions. Assuming there were actions that caused them to be poor, which won’t apply to some people.