I like the way you phrased this because it gets at the heart of why I don't feel good about the present situation. The current treatment and understanding of addiction in general is beyond piss-poor. There's a smattering of drugs, CBT, and then 12 step programs that you can use as treatment... and none of that actually is super successful nor is any of it making many inroads on the ever growing problem of addiction (to all sorts of things, not just drugs and alcohol of course). Humans are as a whole hyper wired up to pretty easily get addicted to various things and we don't have a very good understanding of how to safely untangle that out of people while leaving everything else intact and healthy.

From what I have read there is a lot of support/evidence about social factors heavily influencing the pathways and outcomes of addiction and in times past there were more social safeguards that protected against addiction in ways we benefited from but maybe didn't explicitly understand as doing such a thing. I genuinely think the only way now that we can really fix the issues we as humanity face on a global level is if we acknowledge the necessity of weaving a new social fabric that can encompass everyone and not just the people that some decide truly deserve it. To that point, I believe that people born into very high socioeconomic status or who live there for a certain amount of time experience a specific and unique kind of social abuse from a few different vectors (one from outsiders to their class, and one from their in class peers and family) that results in those same people deeply internalizing parts of feeling dehumanized, while over enabling the parts of them that are allowed to fight back.

For instance, the world mocked Donald Trump for saying that he is fundamentally the same person he was when he was a 7 year old. When I read the book his niece wrote about him, I felt like it was very obvious why he is the way he is and it added a lot of nuance to my thoughts about him, and about what it means to live in a society that breeds monsters and then condemns the monster alone like it was birthed in a vacuum. I came to realize that what someone like Donald Trump really meant with his comments about his younger self is that the adult him prioritizes protecting/enabling/making that little 7 year old memory of him feel good and safe over everything else. That everything adult him does, ultimately it's to please that 7 year old version of him. And the reason he does that even if he never says it, is because his parents were abusive and neglectful towards him when he was actually at that age, and needed them, and he lived in an environment that is isolated enough from the rest of the greater community that no one could get close enough to be genuinely protective. Money was more important than the likes of 7 year old Donald Trump when he was a child in the eyes of the entire world, and he read that loud and clear. Every single time Adult Donald can make a decision or do something that makes the child part of him feel safe, he can basically resurrect the boy that his parents felt totally ok with sacrificing. When you read between the lines of what Elon Musk has shared about his life, and read his story, look at his family, and then look at the timeline of his life, it's very obvious that he is also overcompensating via his access to resources to try to both protect and heal a severely damaged and traumatized inner child.

This is literally how trauma cycles work and perpetuate themselves, and why breaking out of them are so hard. They're just more subtle and hidden with people of a certain socioeconomic status, and the abuse happens in ways that are unfamiliar to the masses. I think many people who fall into addiction are trying to soothe themselves through coping with and trying to survive trauma.

Until we can figure out a way that everyone can belong, no one can belong. That phrase that the child not allowed to sit at the fire will burn the village to feel warmth, IMO applies in our modern age far more to billionaires and the socially elite than to everyday people.