Even if somehow every single homeless person you ever see was a drug addict: Drug withdrawals also have the potential to kill people, especially people without access to food and water.
Drug withdrawals pretty much always involve vomiting and diarrhoea, which would be horrible for someone who has no or very little access to bathrooms or changes of clothes.
Not to mention that without much access to food or water (since in this “nobody should ever give them money” scenario they’d have zero money and only get food or water whenever someone decided to give them some), they’d be much more likely to end up dehydrated from that, and possibly die.
Withdrawals can also give someone seizures, which again would have a chance of killing them.
Basically, forcing someone off a drug cold turkey, especially when they have no or very little access to things like food, water, medical care, shelter, etc can also kill them.
In most cases (as far as I know), people need to come off a drug gradually and/or with medical supervision. Because withdrawal symptoms can kill you.
(Of course in the long term drugs are dangerous and can potentially kill someone, but withdrawal symptoms have the potential to kill someone immediately in the short term, so forcing someone into withdrawal is also harmful)
(Here are sources about this, all of which say that withdrawal symptoms from certain drugs (including alcohol) can involve seizures and be life-threatening, and say that it’s recommended to come off drugs under medical supervision:
https://americanaddictioncenters.org/withdrawal-timelines-treatments/
https://drugabuse.com/library/drug-withdrawal/
https://www.addictionsandrecovery.org/withdrawal.htm
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/alcohol-or-drug-withdrawal
And it’s just common sense that every symptom would be much much worse and more dangerous when experienced by someone who doesn’t have access to food, water, shelter or medical care, in the same way as even something as minor as a cold would be)
Though that said, a person who was homeless and also happened to be addicted to something would only end up with no way of getting what they were addicted to if nobody ever gave them money (as in, what the “never give money to any homeless person in case one of them might be an addict” people’s ideal scenario is), not if any one given person doesn’t give any given other person money.
And apart from that, as other people have probably pointed out, people need more things than just food and water. They might need things like medications, clothes, pads/tampons, and probably more things I can’t think of this second. It makes more sense for a person to get the things they need themselves instead of relying on strangers guessing what their needs are, especially if they have some kind of food allergy or something (which could result in them not being able to eat whatever food people decide to give them without getting horribly sick or worse).
And if someone has money, it means that they can go into some place like McDonalds and buy something in order to be able to stay in there for a while and have temporary shelter and be able to use bathrooms there, or they could spend the night at a hostel (I don’t know how common that is in other places, but here there’s hostels that can cost something like €25 a night).
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