That's an excellent point. It would be interesting to see a chart of the growth of legal pharmaceutical opiates vs the growth of illegal opiates in the past few decades. It won't necessarily show causation ( and maybe not even correlation ) but it would be nice to see how these two opiate markets ( legal and illegal ) grew during the war on drugs.

The data isn't there- survey data is showing declining use of prescription drugs abuse, and even what it does show is around 15% of the 12th grade population having ever abused prescription drugs, with less than 5% having used in the last month. See: https://www.drugabuse.gov/trends-statistics/monitoring-futur...

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.

20% of youth seems like a huge number to me.

What percent do you think play Fortnite?

I said opiate use not Marijuana, which is around 5% monthly use. I'll easily concede Marijuana and alcohol use are major parts of youth culture, although again but as big as people using them think (which I didn't believe in high school / college either).

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 war on drugs has worked for those it was meant to work. It has helped governments grab more power, engage in more violence and create the prison industrial complex we all abhor on HN.

>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...