We've lived for decades under a sort of philosophical polarity. There were people who saw drug abuse and addiction as a moral failure and a weakness, which we needed to approach solely from a punitive approach. Deep in their hearts, many people believe that drug addicts did it to themselves, therefore they're bad, and the only way to deal with them is to tough it out. And at the other end there were people who were compassionate for the drug addicts, and worried about the reasons they got into addiction. Of course, it's a combination of the two.
Drug use is a voluntary behavior.
You do make the initial choice to use the drug. The problem is that, over time, the drug use changes your brain in fundamental and long-lasting ways, and you develop, in effect, another brain state. The person you're dealing with isn't the same person who started using drugs voluntarily. They can't exert the same level of control. There was a lot of disbelief about the effectiveness of treatment.