TAXABLE ADDICTIONS ARE ACCEPTABLE

 

Addiction Is Not Just Lying In The Street

A sharp little pointy stick for polite society

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A lot of ink gets spilled over the hard cases — the visibly addicted, the down-and-out, the person slumped in a doorway, the tent in the park, the emergency call, the ambulance, the disorder.

And yes, that is addiction in its most public and disturbing form.

But it is not the only form.

It may not even be the largest form.

The street addict makes society uncomfortable because the failure is visible. There is no polite curtain. No respectable packaging. No dinner-table disguise. No government label. No tax stamp. Just human wreckage in plain sight.

But addiction also lives behind closed doors.

It lives in nice homes, in professional offices, in restaurants, in golf clubs, in family gatherings, in weekend rituals, and in the quiet nightly drink that stopped being optional a long time ago.

The street addict is called a public disorder problem.
The functioning alcoholic is called a customer.

That may be the real hypocrisy.

Street drugs are condemned as a social crisis. Alcohol is government-approved, heavily taxed, promoted as lifestyle, and normalized as culture. One addiction is criminalized and medicalized. The other helps fund the treasury.

Imagine, just as a civic experiment, that alcohol sales stopped for one week.

Not forever. Just one week.

How many people would be merely annoyed?
How many would be angry?
How many would suddenly discover they are not quite as free as they thought?
How many homes would become very tense, very quickly?

That is the part polite society does not like to talk about.

It is easy to point at the addict on the sidewalk and say, “There is the problem.” It is far less comfortable to admit that addiction runs through society at every level — some of it illegal and visible, some of it legal, respectable, profitable, and taxed.

This does not excuse street disorder. It does not excuse crime. It does not excuse turning downtowns, parks, doorways, businesses, and neighbourhoods into open-air crisis zones.

But it should put a dent in the smugness.

A society that sells one addictive drug through approved channels while wringing its hands over another should perhaps be a little more honest about what it is really dealing with.

The person on the street may be the visible symbol of failure.
The functioning addict may be the quieter proof that the failure is much deeper.

And that brings us back to the treatment question.

We are told to be compassionate. Fair enough. But compassion without honesty is just performance.

We are told treatment is the answer. Again, fair enough. But treatment where? For how long? With what success rate? With what follow-up? With what measurable outcome?

Do not detox people, strip away their tolerance, and throw them back onto the street. That is not treatment. That can be a death sentence.

But do not dress up failure as compassion either.

If the system cannot provide timely detox, real treatment beds, longer-term recovery housing, mental-health support, relapse planning, and hard public reporting on outcomes, then it should stop pretending it has a solution.

Managing addiction is not the same as solving addiction.

Maintaining people in a less-deadly state is not the same as helping them recover.

And pouring more money into a system that cannot clearly show results should not be sold to taxpayers as compassion. It should be called what it is: crisis management.

The uncomfortable truth is this:

Addiction is not just lying in the street.

It is also sitting quietly in living rooms, bars, restaurants, offices, and government revenue reports — approved, taxed, normalized, and politely ignored.

Maybe before society congratulates itself for its compassion toward the visible addict, it should take a harder look at the addictions it has learned to live with, profit from, and call normal.