No mention of the People’s Republic or China? For centuries a large part of the population was addicted to opium, and the trade in the drug was abetted by European imperial powers and then the Japanese Empire as an excellent form of profit and social control. When the communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, they destroyed the opium crop, summarily executed anyone involved in the opium trade, and sent addicts to forced labor camps. Not surprisingly, this strategy worked extremely well in curtailing the use of the drug, although opiate use has crept back up in the time since.

Personally I won’t have anything to do with hard drug addicts because of universally bad experiences I have had with them throughout my life. They can’t be trusted, because all that really matters to them is getting high. If they can steal something and turn it into a bag of drugs they will, and it doesn’t matter who they stealing from. Once people are addicted, they will debase themselves to any degree necessary to score, and I don’t need to see that or be around it. I’ve lived in neighborhoods where drug addiction was prevalent, and they were pretty terrible, dirty, dangerous places. To have anything like a community, there has to be some condition of trust among those who are a part of it, and as I said, drug addicts can’t be trusted. Hopefully individual addicts will see the error of their ways and have the strength to quit using, but until they do that I really don’t have any room for them in my life. Call that “demonization” if you like, but I’m not going to hang around with virulent racists, gang members, nor people who abuse women or children either.