It’s really all about leisure time and disposable income when it comes to which side of the drug equation a country is on, I think.
Perhaps.
Yes, the rise of our wealth and growth of leisure time, in addition to government growing into an insatiable beast (EBT, welfare, SNAP, etc) which supports bad decisions by people and opened our borders to drugs made this possible. When people were going hungry in prior centuries, they knew what to do. You simply WORKED or starved.