Speaking as the father of two drug abusers, one former, the other missing, I submit to you that it starts out as a choice, but you might as well say that a mouse caught in a glue trap made a choice. Addiction is hard to beat.
Once upon a time, I was a smoker. Started out as just playing grown-up behind the barn with cigarettes filched from my mother’s purse. Ended up as an addiction. Very hard to escape from. My present addictions are to coffee, but tobacco was destructive and ensnaring.
As for Fentanyl, that is murder. It is getting laced into bootlegged pills and even mary jane, all of which is bad, but just kids doing stupid stuff as rebellious teens, maybe just once due to peer pressure. And in short order, they end up dead.
Drug pushers are not supposed to kill their customers. That’s a bad business model even for them. That is murder committed by Xi Jinpig via Mexican cartels.
The same holds for the Chinese being hooked on opium over a hundred years ago. Everyone wanted Chinese tea, silver and china-ware, but the Emperor would accept no form of payment other than silver. So merchants come to China to do business began trafficking in opium. The Emperor didn’t want his subjects hooked on opium, so tried to put an end to it, and because British flintlocks were superior to Chinese matchlocks, and clippers had better firepower than junks, the Emperor was defeated, and the opium trade continued, but imperial sovereignty was destroyed.
According to Lin Yutang, the Japanese were doing the same in a run-up to invasion, only with heroine, and with diabolical trickery, such as lacing cigarettes with the poison.
Would you want that to happen to the US of A? It was a shameful chapter in British history. We’re all reaping the “benefits” of it to this day, with China rising from the ashes as a monstrous communist state, stealing technology, grabbing territory, and pushing Fentanyl on our children.
No, and I've long advocated the death penalty for drug dealers and enablers at every level, from street hustler to kingpin and their financiers.
I can relate as I too am a former smoker and cold-turkey quitter. I also have a former drug-abusing son (but did not result in addiction as far as I can tell) who partied for two terms in a northeastern university at our expense, then followed the Grateful Dead's tours around the country for several years. Just good fortune that he didn't get a hot load along the way. When he was in that mode I included him among those I deem undesirables. And wondered where I'd gone wrong.
I hope your missing one is found and turns out OK. But we can do little to affect their choices once they leave our control.