You got in Texas. It is just better concealed, and maybe you are not quite so far down the road.
With every phenomenon, there is a distribution. Some areas will be more effected early than others. Just their bad luck. But it all evens out, over time.
To a certain extent, economic despair opens the door. Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings, as they used to say. But this door will get opened everywhere, eventually.
“With every phenomenon, there is a distribution. Some areas will be more effected early than others. Just their bad luck. But it all evens out, over time.”
It’s not bad luck that one gets addicted to crack cocaine or gets addicted to heroin, it’s bad decisions. Furthermore, geographic and economic distributions of drug use does not even out as the crack epidemic of the 1980’s-1990’s primarily was contained within the black urban underclass.
As for time, time has demonstrated that while crack/addiction is down, the use and addition rates for opioids has increased.