Children grow up to be drug addicts because of dysfunctional homes

Florence Craven (Irish Examiner, Letters, January 14) sets the bar very high for compassion.

Another way of looking at the “self-inflicted” illnesses that are drink-, cigarette- or drug-induced is to go back to when that person was a child.

They were born in a state of perfection, with the potential to be anything. It seems unlikely their parents — even the ones not fit to raise a child — wished for them to grow up and become a drug addict or to repeat the same cycle of mistakes.