The Utility Of Spirituality, Love & Connection

I work as a mental health therapist with people who have addiction problems of one sort or another, primarily drugs and/or alcohol.  In order to help them stay clean and sober, I generally emphasize the importance of spirituality, love and  connections, factors that are frequently missing from their lives.  It often makes me sad that these things are largely absent from their lives.  Like me, they turned to drugs and/or alcohol, in part,  to make up for that lack and, as in my case, addiction followed.  I suspect that focusing on the cultural development of spirituality, love and  connection would be a more useful method of “fighting the war on drugs”, than is punishment or imprisonment, addressing the causes rather than symptoms.