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Addicts deserve our sympathy. But society has forced many decent people into these harsh views about them, because institutions don’t take the necessary steps to protect these people from themselves, and therefore to protect us from them.
Your brother should have been taken to a psychiatric inpatient facility and have been kept there for 5+ years before being released. We can do this humanely. People do survive addiction, even to heroin, and go on to have happy, productive, drug-free lives. But it takes time, and it takes things that we no longer really do in the West.
Disparate impact is the meta for escaping accountability. Racism, mental illness, trauma (no longer restricted to acute incidental causes, with nebulous childhood and intergenerational traumas now accepted as equally valid) are unassailable escape clauses, and proximate trauma is now an accepted escape clause too. Censuring families for poorly managing their delinquent kin was socially accepted, but now it is rude to not consider every exculpatory clause for bad behavior.
The west has accepted self-declared victimisation as a social meta to extract goodwill and therefore resources from compliant populations. Whether this compliance will remain eternally subservient is currently unknown, but signs point to this meta breaking apart.
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