People are selfish by nature. Our selfishness often leads us to seek pleasure, peace, comfort, and safety; even at the cost of others. This is why we live in the culture of “why should I help an addict who chose to ruin their own life”. This is a selfish mentality.
People remain selfish, not because it’s in their nature, but due to lack of knowledge. For example, how many times do you find pleasure from blocking someone trying to cut you off when you’re driving? If you had the knowledge that this person was in a rush to the hospital to see his dying mother, you’d gladly let the person cut you off. Selfish by nature; but we remain selfish due to lack of knowledge.
I say that, because on the opposite, completely opposite side of the spectrum; people care a lot about one another, under one situation… if the other person’s life is at risk. Despite a person’s selfishness, one will go out of their way to save another person’s life, as long as there’s an ‘immediate and definite risk’, or imminent danger that can lead to death.
Because we have in our nature to help save a life at an ‘immediate and definite risk’ that can lead to death, the moment that this imminent risk is removed, we resort back to our natural selfish state. And we remain in the selfish state, unless educated about how one thing can lead to death if left unchanged.
A typical person will always listen to someone crying out for help in their most dire moment. Thus, if we educate people that someone abusing drugs is crying out for help because living without drugs is not an option; then we may realize this fact: that addict is in their most dire moment and are crying out for help.
The issue is that, substance abuse is a form of suicide that takes years; we naturally are not equipped to jump and save the person because of the lack of ‘immediate and definite risk’ that can lead to death. Human beings are have no understanding of how to react to a person who’s choosing this form of “suicide”.