I find this exceedingly difficult to believe in the rural areas of the US. The current expansion is almost the longest on record, going on since 2009. The structural forces that have hollowed out the economies of rural areas (widening inequality, e-commerce, globalization, etc.) are only increasing, not decreasing. The drug overdoses may be caused by powerful opiates like fentanyl, but the drug use is mainly a symptom, not cause, of despair.
then the blame would shift from China to the new country.
maybe instead of blaming others, we should fix ourselves. stop buying cheap dangerous drugs and decriminalize the drugs we do have
Anabolic Steroids are one example, Fentanyl is another, I'm sure there are many more.
For example I wouldn't be surprised if there's a black market for agricultural chemicals that are banned in the US but you can get them from China.
It's definitely intellectual fraud. This is a life expectancy projection for babies born in 2017 and it's assuming the opioid overdoses (the recent scale of which didn't exist ten years ago) continue unabated for seven or eight more decades.
Add to this the statistical factors like the anti smoking and healthy living campaigns hitting their peak effect a few decades after improvents in modern science hit their peak effectiveness.
To me, it seems like life exectancy will improve again as the economy improves and governments find ways to fight fentynal.
Improving life expectancy maked great advancements in healthcare and sanitaion and lifestyle in the past. As these improvements seem to have peaked I dont know that life expectany is still a good indicator of progress in rich nations