>But that has nothing to do with the reality that the best response is to stop doing heroin.
This is inaccurate. The best response is medically supervised detoxification. Stopping heroin without medical supervision can cause severe dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, cardiovascular issues and aspiration pneumonia. To say nothing of the likelihood of relapse overdose.
You should never, ever tell a person addicted to heroin to "just stop doing heroin" (or, to be more charitable to the original claim, "just" tell them to "stop doing heroin") and them continuing do heroin is not the same as "refusing to help themselves."
We're talking about social media, not literally heroin. Heroin is physically addictive and you can die by going cold turkey. That's not true for social media.
TikTok the first thing they do before having a thought of their own in the morning, and the last thing before falling asleep in bed, and all day long as well. At least heroin you run out and have to leave the house at some point. People judge you so you can't be doing heroin in public, meanwhile everyone and their mom is glued to their phone these days. You're right, it's not heroin. It's worse.
Heroin's harms are mostly from the fact that it's illegal. Legalize it, make it cost a dollar for a week's worth of it, and the harms we see go away (to be replaced by other problems). Junkies mostly just want more heroin. Meanwhile, everyone's mainlining TikTok to all abandon right out in public, and no one bats an eye. People are losing jobs because they can't get off TikTok but because you can't film them and conclude they got fired from work because of it, it doesn't get the same kind of media attention.
The best response is to stop doing heroin over time, but that doesn't mean the best method for them doing that is saying "heroin is bad for you".
Millions of people have been addicted to heroin and got off it. And I'm fairly sure about 0 of the people who got off it did so when one kind soul came up to them and said "you should stop doing heroin it's bad for you"
Blaming a heroin addict for not quitting heroin is not constructive. It's addictive. That's how it works. It induces chemical dependency. You wouldn't blame a gunshot victim for bleeding all over the table cloth due to the laws of fluid dynamics.
Blame is not usually constructive. However, linking cause and effect can be. If a gunshot victim pointed the gun at themselves and pulled the trigger, I'm unsure how telling them they should not do that is blaming them.
