One of my passengers, whom I helped get off alcohol, said her downward spiral started with stimulants. Her husband had brought cocaine home from 'work' in California. He had emotional problems related to childhood. When cocaine got expensive they switched to meth amphetamine. She realized it was causing problems for her when she realized she'd been short with her youngest child.
At one point her other boy was prescribed Adderall (amphetamine) for ADD. That experiment only lasted for two weeks. She kept these Adderall pills on reserve, and used them to wean herself off the methamphetamine. That's when her anxiety started. After a few months of medical treatment, she found the 'anxiety' was perfectly relieved with alcohol. Whoops. [She ran back to the bottle every time she got a little stressed. I eventually encouraged her to use cannabis to mellow out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21889546 ]
Our dear leaders should come out of their ivory towers and figure out what actually happens on the streets. The War on Drugs has been ongoing for over a hundred years. People cycle in and out of jail/prison, but they don't get better from being mickeyed up (incarcerated).
From my perspective as a simple former taxi driver, the drug war is just a make-work program for public defenders: the bad chemicals get confiscated and the bad people get locked up, but people still have the same amount of unaddressed distress. People are usually worse off after getting corrected than they were before.
Two of my passengers informed me that cocaine is a much more pleasant drug than meth amphetamine. I don't have any reports about heroin vs. fentanyl. [Someone on twitter pointed out the drug cartels transitioned to Fentanyl when it became apparent that Afghanistan's heroin production was going to go offline.]
Bringing back cheap plant-based drugs (cocaine, heroin, etc) is an important step of harm reduction while society figures out how to effectively address the reasons behind our suffering.