Drug problem greatly exacerbated by the restructuring of the economy in recent decade, by Karl Denninger. Everyone has events sometime in their lives that encourage a bit of self medication. But public policy has been ensuring those events are occurring more often to some classes of people, lately:

Maybe the event doesn’t pass because they’re not rocket scientists (after all, the bell curve is real and thus so is intelligence and mental capacity) and we sent all the jobs that are both rewarding and accessible to those folks that aren’t on the far right of the curve to China and India, and of those remaining we looked the other way while millions of illegal, unskilled laborers flooded our nation.

In other words we cheered on the screwing of a large part of the population of this country — and then we express shock, outrage and revulsion when they turn to the bottle — whether it’s got booze, prescription drugs or heroin in it. …

We already screwed anyone with under a roughly 120 IQ out of the ability to raise a family on one income without the government grossly subsidizing them, especially in high-tax parts of the country. Why did we allow that “high tax and cost of living” crap to develop in the first place? …

Some suggestions:

You want lasting change with regard to drug abuse and outcomes? Look to Portugal, which legalized basically everything. Drug abuse rates fell like a stone.

But if you want to actually take care of the underlying problem that leads to drug abuse of all sorts then you need to address the fraud all over our economy and those who intentionally exploit everyone and everything they can, starting with people like Zuckerberg and the so-called “multinationals” such as Apple that not only avoid taxes on income they really do earn here (the fruits of their operations) but firms that do things like cost-shift call centers and then claim the activity is “there” (when it really isn’t; it’s for the benefit of people here.)

The fact of the matter is that a couple of ordinary intelligence must be able to feed, house and clothe both themselves and a couple of kids on one income, not two, and make it work — in essentially all areas of the country — without taking handouts. If you do that then the reason for a huge percentage of those who currently use drugs to do so disappears.

But for that to happen the scams have to disappear across the board, and utterly nobody is talking about doing it.