>>213902127
It's not the no one wants to punish them, it's that no one wants to help them. You could lock these junkies up in jail, and then what? You let them back onto the street and they go right back to getting their next hit.
>just lock them up long enough so that they're forced to go cold turkey and recover
Then you're spending more money to keep someone in prison longer without any real guarantee that they're going to kick their addiction.
The actual solution would be putting these people in a hybrid prison/rehab facility where they're given help by trained professionals to recover from addiction. At the same time the police should be targeting the sources of these drugs, not the actual drug users themselves. That way there's a greater chance that these addicts recover, and when they are released there will be less means of obtaining their drugs anyways. But funding something like that is the equivalent of communism in America, so it's never going to happen.