The Congressional Joint Economic Committee just put out a study on “deaths of despair,” meaning deaths in the U.S. caused by either alcohol, drugs or suicide. All three–drugs especially–have skyrocketed to record levels in the past 20 years:
Alcohol-related deaths, which were ironically falling prior to prohibition and rising after it was enacted, are now at a 100-year high.
Suicides are as high as they’ve been since the Great Depression.
Drug-related deaths are more than three times higher than they’ve ever been in all of history, and nearly twenty-fold since their low-point in the late 1950s.
Combine all these causes of death and you have what the Joint Economic Committee calls “deaths of despair”: people using drugs and alcohol to numb the pain, or outright killing themselves.
Many of us probably have a vague sense that something is deeply wrong with our country, but we’re told it’s all in our heads because we have iPhones and Netflix and because GDP is expanding.
No: something is wrong with America.
We are in the midst of a spiritual crisis. With religion and family in decline, and with our communities transformed by endless foreign immigration, it’s no wonder this is happening.
The only question is whether you believe this all happened by accident or whether it is by design.