There are a lot of things you aren't able to disprove that are (probably) not true.
People in social groups that routinely use drugs tend to over estimate their prevalence in society at large. Even weed is below 50% lifetime use and 20% monthly use for 12th graders.
I'd argue fortnite is a bigger part of youth culture than opiates.
What percent do you think play Fortnite?
As for Fortnite share- there are ~76 million unique fortnite players in a month and supposedly 40-60% of them are between 18-24. I'm going to go with the low number. I have no good data on Fortnite play by country other than its popular in the USA and parts of Europe, but not in Asia, so I'll just say that 1/6 of the players live in the USA (again, probably pretty conservative). There are roughly 25 million 18-24 year olds in the US. So we get 76M*.4/6 = 5M for the number of monthly US fortnite players in the US, or roughly 20% of the population in question.
A lot more than opioid users, roughly the same as reported marijuana use, and a lot less than alcohol use.
>The monetary cost of U.S. domestic drug policy is equally remarkable. Since the War on Drugs began more than 40 years ago, the U.S. government has spent more than $1 trillion on interdiction policies. Spending on the war continues to cost U.S. taxpayers more than $51 billion annually
That is $1T to polices, contractors, private prisons, prison guard unions and so on. It is an economy in itself.
Here is plenty of information on the topic.
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/four-decad...
Meh. If you look at the next chart you can see that drug prices started to plummet in the mid 70s, probably aided by the opening up of smuggling routes from Colombia (my theory).
So expenditure on drugs isn't a reliable indicator here - if they had figures for quantities (ie, weight) bought/sold you may reach a different conclusion.
The numbers are % of PCE. So that number could go down for a number of reasons:
1. People buying less drugs
2. People spending less money on the same amount of drugs (lower prices)
3. People’s PCE is growing faster than the amount they spend on drugs
There are others I’m sure.