When you underfund your health care system, people who experience chronic pain or anxiety will turn to the gray/black market for short term pain relief.

Many of the substances on the gray/black market are habit forming, have ugly side-effects, and are prohibitively expensive. Without a doctor’s oversight, people routinely overdose or otherwise misuse these medical alternatives.

The chronic pain, combined with the side-effects and OD risks, render people unfit for daily working and living habits. These people become their own kind of chronic social burden - high rates of vagrancy, poor impulse control, malnutrition, vectors for contagious disease (particularly STDs and other need-born illnesses), higher rates of violent crimes, high rates of pregnancy and miscarriage, danger to others while operating motor vehicles, etc, etc, etc.

The “drug use” is seen as the proximate cause of all these social ills, in large part because pursuing pain/anxiety relief becomes a central motivation for chronic users. And because they’re habit forming, it is far more difficult and expensive to discourage future drug use after full adoption than via early intervention.

On top of all this, the increase in the size and the higher economic position of people operating in a national security state sets off a self-replicating cycle. Cops are seen as fundamentally more useful than nurses or social workers. Cops operate as large unionized labor blocks and criminal cartels. Cops receive oodles of positive press coverage and are routinely valorized for performing a hazardous and undesirable job.

So, on the one hand, you have a civilian population that craves health care and falls back on toxic substitutes, which transform them into public nuisances and real criminal hazards. On the other, you have a large, well-organized, media-savvy cartel of goons who make up a steadily larger share of the economic “middle class”. Villainizing drug users and valorizing drug enforcement officers wins elections. Meanwhile, medicalizing drug abuse and defunding the police is electoral poison.

The lesson appears to be clear.

Less health care. More cops. Politicians win.

They don’t want to learn, they want to harm marginalized communities, or appear tough on crime to old out of touch and stubborn Conservatives or distract from something (often corruption) or some mix of the above.

I don’t think anyone even slightly aware think wars on drugs are positive for the population.

In many places at least in Europe incl. where I live substance abuse is seen as a social problem first and foremost and not a criminal problem. You get support from society, like free fresh needles or safe places to use, social care and health care. Chance to get rid of the addiction and start over. Of course if it becomes a criminal problem those parts are dealt accordingly.