Growing up in the 1970s, I was often bored as a kid. Just three or four channels on TV with rarely something good to watch (ABC's "Battle of the Network Stars" anyone?). Videotaped movies were still in the future. The local cinema just had the one or two movies at any given time (multiplex cinemas were not common yet). People had hi-fi stereos but an LP record cost $7.99 so you were stuck with your parents' Slim Whitman and Engelbert Humperdinck LPs. No video games unless you had a pocketful of quarters to go to the arcade with (and they were still mostly pinball machines).
Yes, life was boring for a teen during the 1970s. So sneaking out to the woods with a case of purloined beer (usually Black Label or Schlitz) and a bag of marijuana was somewhat understandable.
But in today's world, there is simply no time to get bored. In fact the real problem is that there are not nearly enough hours in the day to consume even a fraction of the massive amounts and forms of entertainment available to the average person today.
So why turn to drugs? That really confuses me.
It’s just another kind of entertainment. Drugs are fun, and they mix with other entertainment. Heck half the music industry is specifically designed to mix with certain drugs, psychedelic, stoner metal, reggae, country. Nobody sets out to get hooked, they set out to have fun, a different kind of fun than the “legit” entertainment industry. It takes months to rev up to daily use and usually months of that to actually get hooked. It all starts off as a simple diversion, just like going to a movie.
I agree. I cannot understand why anyone needs drugs in a world that contains Haydn's Trumpet Concerto in E-Flat Major. I can get high just sitting and listening to it. Surely there are other things - music, art, books, movies - that would affect other people in the same way that music affects me. To me, drugs look like a quick way to get something that's better anyway if you earn it.
Drugs in most cases has little to do with boredom.
It has a lot to do with the self-administered treatment of a spiritual or mental breakage.
I believe a combination of several things has combined to make this particularly destructive today in America. What you said about the 1970s was true, but in today's world young people are over-stimulated and under-challenged in ways we've never seen before. For a lot of the young people I've come across in my profession, even the idea of sneaking out to the woods with a case of beer seems as incomprehensible to them as an expedition to the South Pole.