I can assure you it’s far from easy to get PIP, as I’m going through the process at the moment. It’s degrading and stressful (which is the thing I’ve been told to avoid) and seems entirely arbitrary. The application process is opaque and assessment is not performed by medical professionals. If someone IS getting PIP, they have jumped through MASSIVE hoops to do so. If you think they’re “cheating” then I challenge you to try to get it yourself. You really seem to have no idea.

I hate your reductive “if they’d just” rhetoric, whether directed at drug use or other “simple to solve” difficulties that are, in practice, far from simple to solve. You see an outward symptom as the root cause, and you also fallaciously assume that even if that IS the root cause, that it’s easy to solve. And before you assume that I’m one of those people “doing drugs all the time”, I’m not.

I started working in 1985, and I’ve worked right up to July last year, when I got ill. Prior to that, I seldom had time off sick - I had less than two weeks off in the past decade.