For a lot of these people, it's a choice. Our government system literally encourages people to become homeless druggies.
Have you tried to buy alcohol? See how expensive it is? Black market drugs are cheaper than alcohol.
Have you tried to get a job in Canada recently? Some people have been looking for 6+ months and haven't found anything.
Have you seen how much things costs and how much people pay in taxes?
Have you ever wondered how guys making like $50k/yr are surviving? A lot of them have side hussles selling drugs or pumping out girls. Or, they have parental support.
42% of people in the USA are receiving some form of parental support. I think it's higher in Canada.
A growing share of American adults are still relying on their parents for financial support, as persistent affordability pressures reshape everything.
local12.com
What ends up happening is you get people whose choice in life is share rent for 6 people you hate to work at McDonald's making shit wages, still paying taxes to a government you hate albeit lower, what supervisors you hate and schedules you hate all the while never getting ahead. Why do that? So people turn to drugs to cope and eventually they get fired from the McDonald's job cause they're calling in sick from the drugs too much and not able to hold the job down. They still need a way to make money so they start trying to sell drugs and do whatever side hussles they can: prostitution, theft, whatever. They they learn to start abusing all the "help" programs to sustain themselves. It spirals from there. Before long, they actually prefer the lifestyle of a homeless bum doing drugs than the lifestyle of a McDonald's employee.
Even guys who seemed to be doing good in life can quickly spiral out of control if they don't get a job and have no parental support.
There's other situations too like guys getting into divorces, losing all their stuff and still owing money to their exes. They end up trying to make money without the money being official so they can skirt government orders on their income then end up in prison and it spirals from there.
I know a guy who had a good job but wasn't making much money. He started selling drugs to get laid by women druggies (which worked) cause he couldn't find success with women any other way and his day job didn't pay enough. He got thrown in prison. Now he can't get a job doing what he was doing before because of his criminal record. The only reason he's not a bum on the street is because his family are super wealthy so they bought him a house and gave him a job working for the family business. Without this sort of support, it's so easy to get fucked.
The reality is that our system in every aspect encourages these people. We incentivize it even.
We need to lower taxes, cut all social programs, decriminalize drugs and DUIs (DUIs really fuck people over in society to the point it can spiral also). We need to stop bringing in immigrants and we need to stop propping up housing values. We're strangling workers in this society to the point that they're becoming homeless drug users.