See that's just small thinking. DEA gets tons of money to bust folks so that they can be arrested and made to work for free. That's why there's so much pumping drugs into communities either via the CIA or the more recent vogue method of making heroin a prescription drug that some family can profit off of.

The entire point of NOT helping drug abusers is so that we can maintain a steady stream of slave labor. Because we still haven't figured out how to do this whole society thing without a bunch of people in forced labor, or as some lawmakers like to say to make sound nicer, penal labor.

That's the entire point of the Prison-Industries Act of 1979. It's explicitly to create a legal slave labor under the 13th amendment so that states can have various industries be mostly worked by slave labor. When you make something that is a chemical addiction illegal, you create assurances for prisoners that will be in your slave labor. When you deny help for that chemical addiction and put the onus onto the users ("Well I guess you shouldn't have gotten addicted to a drug your doctor prescribed to you!") you've basically created a system that absolutely assures people will be finding their way back under your whip.

I cannot stress this enough, the United States is NOT interested in actually stopping drug abuse because we've woven that deeply into our very way of life. There are too many core things of modern society that rely on slave labor in this country. Anyone trying to "fix it" would unravel all of that. I mean SHIT, some rich white guy MIGHT not be able to buy their second yacht! Is this the society we want?

But seriously for a second, the US has a very messed up take on how to handle those who need help for drug addiction. And it is in ways that if we all had a better perspective on it, we'd be ashamed that we're still living like we're in the 1700s. The whole Sackler family, they didn't get away with it for so long just because the Government was sleeping at the wheel. They got away with it for so long because it was beneficial for a lot of people, one of them the prison industry. This country will look the other way on some serious shady shit as long as it drives a profit. The Housing market crash, opioid epidemic, climate change, and so on. Anyone want to count on one hand how many people have faced prison for those things? Our country is way more fucked up than just some law enforcement budget, but yeah, 100% and more what you said.

Fentanyl?

There will still be a black market to crack down on. Those cartels won't just say "oh I guess that's it".