Heroin has properties attractive to people in a hopeless, brutal war beyond what they can get from bridge club. Self-medication is not exactly recreation.
You should also look skeptically at claims that having unprotected sex with possible HIV carriers guarantees that you will get HIV. But you should still put a goddamn condom on.
tl:dr; Rats given access to their choice of clean water and morphine water, and placed in two enclosures: Rat cage and rat park. Rats living in a miserable rat cage will develop a morphine habit. Rats living in a pleasant rat park will avoid the morphine. Rats moved from rat cage to rat park easily kick their morphine habit after a brief period of withdrawal symptoms.
tl:dr;tl:dr;
Rats self-medicate with morphine IFF life is crap.
Exactly. Because it's heroin combined with other shit going on that almost certainly causes brain changes and chemical reactions on it's own.
So heroin in combo with war is not the same as heroin while visiting disney world on a nice summer day on your vacation (clearly my hypothesis nothing to back this up).
(There is by the way another "addictive" type behavior that starts at a time in ones life that, while not at war, is a time of deep changes in personality as well as hormonal changes. My hypothesis also suggests that this would add to the addictive nature of this activity as well in some people.)
You should also look skeptically at claims that having unprotected sex with possible HIV carriers guarantees that you will get HIV. But you should still put a goddamn condom on.