Cultural Suicide?

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/eaau1184

There is a developing drug epidemic in the United States. Jalal et al. analyzed nearly 600,000 unintentional drug overdoses over a 38-year period. Although the overall mortality rate closely followed an exponential growth curve, the pattern itself is a composite of several underlying subepidemics of different drugs. Geographic hotspots have developed over time, as well as drug-specific demographic differences.

Are we broken? Maybe this is just a bio-trigger controlling population growth like our little monkey wars?

It's all about the Johann Hari Ted talk, pointed to by Clod here (I hope this is the one I'm thinking of):

https://cellar.org/showpost.php?p=1010965&postcount=5

Give rats in standard lab cages morphine, and they take right to it. But put the rats in a beautiful "rat park", with other rats to be social with, and lots of space to explore, and wheels and things; and they reject the morphine.

Without meaning, without fulfilment, we are just rats in a cage.

^^^this^^^
rats only go for the "drug lever" when they have *nothing else* in their life

Not wanting to go there so much as to get away from here.