The writer of this article should be put in charge of drug policy in this country immediately. Finally, someone who articulates the real drug problem! Addiction is a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself. "We have created a society in which the big, defining, joys of human life — marriage, parenthood, deepening roots in a community, work whose contribution to society is acknowledged both by a living wage and social markers of respect — are at best precarious and fraught, at worst simply foreclosed, to large swathes of the population." Those vast swathes of people and communities have been left behind and forgotten about by our politicians when jobs were shipped overseas. To further exacerbate the problem, automation is eliminating even more jobs. Tax dollars pay for prisons, further diverting money from education and other services that could improve life for the whole community! If these issues aren't confronted, America will be a third world country very soon!