Set aside that the United States is the world’s leading jailer, that despite claiming only 5% of the world’s population, our government is responsible for 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Set aside that when it comes to caging humans, the “Land of the Free” blows away the rest of the world, including China, Russia, North Korea – every other country – and that over 500,000 are non-violent offenders tied to the counter-productive, never-ending, Nixon-contrived “War on Drugs”.

Instead, please take into consideration the mounting, thoughtful science concerning addiction and those afflicted with it. More and more, telling an addict to ‘just stop’ using mirrors telling a schizophrenic or an epileptic to ‘just stop’ acting weird – even a cancer patient to ‘just stop’ having cancer.

Although when it comes to understanding the human brain we are in our infancy, our brightest minds know enough about the brains of addicts to realize that they are not bad people, only that their brains are imbalanced enough to behave abnormally.

I’m reluctant to pose arguments of this sort in the wake of someone’s death, but by all accounts of which I’m aware, Philip Seymour Hoffman was a fine person. He was another victim of addiction who deserved better support system than the one in place.

Here in the “Land of the Free”, despite the mounting evidence understood by our brightest minds, we literally wage war against individuals suffering from addiction as if it’s going to do either them or future addicts any good. Citizens who genuinely need help cannot depend on their our government for assistance; only persecution, imprisonment, or worse.

Well-meaning people such as counselors and rehabilitation specialists follow career paths that look to empathize and provide assistance to those who suffer. If only our authorities – who we are forced to elect, who we forced to fund, who we are forced to obey – approached these same individuals so admirably.

Out of compassion, I’d refrain from arguing this or similar matters had a dear friend passed, or had the individual been a dear friend of any of yours. Like many of you I’ve been and will be huge fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Should his death signal anything beyond his life alone, it’s that the time’s long overdue for us to reconsider both what we know and how we feel about addiction and what we want our lawmakers to do about it.

Heartbreak hits harder when it hits closer to home, but like countless others, Philip Seymour Hoffman had a home too.