When Rob Henderson got to Yale, he explains (in Troubled), he helped a female senior with some boxes:
We entered her room, and I set the boxes down. She opened the larger box and pulled out a large case of pills.
The medication rattled as she set it on her desk.
“Nice stash. Anything for sale?” I joked.
“Yeah, the Adderall is.” She didn’t appear to be joking.
I thought back to my first day in high school, and how my neighbor offered to sell me drugs. Now here I was at this fancy college, and this senior is offering to sell drugs, too. Later, I’d observe rampant drug and alcohol use on campus. This was at odds with the widespread belief, which I held at the time, that poverty was the primary reason for substance abuse.
Misery causes drug abuse, whether rich or poor. Junkies and drunks are just self medicating in a self destructive way. When thousands of American soldiers, who were hooked on heroin, returned from Vietman the vast majority quickly kicked the habit. With the reason for their misery gone they stopped using.
I noticed this first hand, when a buddy moved in with his girlfriend. Before she moved in he was a social drinker, after a few months with her he was an alcoholic. When she moved out he fully recovered.
What is Henderson taking about? I was under the impression that it was a broadly believed meme and one frequently portrayed in popular entertainment for several generations before Henderson was born that college kids got drunk and enjoyed / experimented with recreational drugs quite a lot. Maybe Rob’s poorer friends couldn’t afford to watch those episodes of South Park or didn’t hear about George W Bush’s “youthful indiscretions”? Man, the left really is alienating people from their own history, lol.
At any rate, compared to what is average for their age cohorts, what is the annual rate for Yalies ODing on fentanyl? What measures correlate with overdosing on opioids? Now that might be more in line with Hendersons pattern.