Addiction is a destructive force for anyone who falls victim to it–and whether it manifests through LSD, painkillers, or gambling, nobody is immune. At the same time, it’s no secret that addiction inflicts its harshest consequences among the most economically disadvantaged.
Fundamentally, low-income individuals are more vulnerable to substance and behavioral addictions than their higher-income counterparts. Constant stressors like struggling to pay rent, buy food, or achieve personal goals can instate hopelessness and a bad outlook on life, causing many to look towards dopamine-driven habits as escapisms. Low-income adults also tend to have smaller social webs than higher-income counterparts, leaving the former group more isolated and with less to fall back on in times of trouble. A study from the journal Addiction and Health observed that people involved in substance abuse have lower self-esteem than those without it, a finding that establishes the mental turmoil low-income individuals try to protect themselves from.
While drugs and behavioral addictions often originate as mechanisms to combat these mental struggles, they can easily expand into draining addictions that entrench their victims in the cycle of poverty. For one, addiction is expensive: an article from the Addiction Center called Addiction and Low-Income Areas noted that financial maintenance of an addiction is a major cause for financial struggles among already-poor Americans. Individuals’ tolerance increases over time, meaning that more of a given drug or experience must be consumed in order to achieve the same detached state as before. And by the time a given substance or activity becomes challenging to financially accommodate, the individual is typically addicted already, and funds for drugs may be set aside with the same consistency as funds for bills or food are. In many cases, money for addiction is even prioritized over these basic responsibilities.
Addiction has indirect taxes, too. It’s harder to perform up to work standards, and with most low-income people working in dead-end, highly replaceable jobs, the margin of work performance error is much smaller than it is in jobs with a lower supply. For the same reasons, it can be daunting for poor workers to request time off for rehabilitation.
In addition to job insecurity, addiction compounds car, health, and life insurance premium costs for those with it, while those without it are put further out of reach from having access. Substance abuse also drives up medical costs due to the array of health issues derived from it. In any area of life imaginable, addiction and poverty work in tandem to make life more overwhelming, prompting a deeper fall into addiction–all the while, escaping the poverty cycle becomes more demanding.
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