DRUG ENFORCEMENT is important, but has its limitations (Shutterstock).

Nobody wants to be considered a “dope,” but there doesn’t seem to be any end to the number of folks who want to be doped-up, drunk, high, spit-faced, smashed, lit, etc.

Equally impressive – in a depressing sense – is the seemingly endless variety of ways that people can discover to shed their good judgment, increase your risk of losing your job, your car, your marriage and even your life.

Alcohol abuse is as old as the Old Testament. Smoking various kinds of herbs was popular among Native Americans long before there was any America, as least as far as the Europeans knew.

The big dope boom in the Sixties was significant because it moved from the poverty and isolation of the big cities into the suburbs. Thanks, John, Paul, George and Ringo! It might not be an exaggeration to suggest your popularization of narcotics might well have been as fatal as the Vietnam War.

As a kid, the sniffing of model airplane glue had its followers, and well as those who tried to smoke dried banana peels. Later trends embraced LSD, cocaine, “crack” cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and on and on.

Efforts to combat this problem have resembled the old joke about the “War on Poverty,” in which poverty is said to have won.

Now we have ‘whippits” and Kratom, which local cities are moving to ban, or at least wag a finger, at them.

There are, of course, many causes for these bad choices. But one of them, experts say, is simply loneliness. Today’s tech-oriented world has atomized us. Many of our “friends” reside at the far end of the world-wide-web.

There’s a good chance you don’t know much about your neighbors and belong to no local club, softball team, service group, etc. Local newspapers (and local news coverage) are becoming a thing of the past, so we know less and less about what’s going on with the people who may live just a few blocks away.

Good friends, a loving family, a strong faith or belief system seem to be what’s missing for too many people. And that’s something that no ordinance, crackdown or even jail alone seems to have much luck filling in that fatal gap.