It’s morally difficult, of course. There’s a reason we count these among deaths of despair, because borrowing happiness from tomorrow sounds like a fair deal to anyone who expects tomorrow to be even worse than today, or to not exist at all “for tomorrow we die.”

I think pity is the appropriate response, even in the context of remediation/intervention, because despair is the darkest place one can find oneself. While life choices may hasten that descent, including things like alcoholism, despair itself is never a choice.