With the onset of “deaths of despair” starting to lower the life expectancy of some Americans, I’ve been keeping a mental file of stories that remind me of conditions that obtained in Russia during the Yeltsin era. We’re not anywhere near there yet, but when I hear of copper gutters being stolen, that enters the file.

And yesterday the New York Times had a piece on the surge of alcohol-related deaths during the pandemic that really caught my eye:

Among adults younger than 65, alcohol-related deaths actually outnumbered deaths from Covid-19 in 2020; some 74,408 Americans ages 16 to 64 died of alcohol-related causes, while 74,075 individuals under 65 died of Covid. And the rate of increase for alcohol-related deaths in 2020 — 25 percent — outpaced the rate of increase of deaths from all causes, which was 16.6 percent.
The alcohol-related deaths went up for everybody — men, women, as well as every ethnic and racial group. Deaths among men and women increased at about the same rate, but the absolute number of deaths among men was much higher.
Drug overdose deaths also reached record levels during the first year of the pandemic, with more than 100,000 Americans dying of overdoses during the 12-month period that ended in April 2021, a nearly 30 percent increase over the previous year, according to reports issued in November. The number of deaths from opioids in which alcohol played a role also increased.
Young adults ages 25 to 44 experienced the greatest increases in alcohol-related deaths in 2020, rising nearly 40 percent over the previous year, according to the new report.

Now of course, some of this is driven by pandemic isolation. But the troubling part is that some of these baleful trends pre-dated the pandemic.

When I read reports like this, I’m grateful that candidates such as J. D. Vance regularly try to change the subject of political debates from the Donbas to what’s happening in the Ohio River Valley.