Why is this happening?

This is the generation that's very familiar with prescription meds. So, if you were born in the late 90s or early 2000s, you had classmates who probably were taking some medication for learning differences, anxiety, sports injuries, and so on. The familiarity with these pills, and the fact that they're everywhere in movies, pop culture, and commercials, where there's a pill for every ill, it's no surprise that some kids feel overwhelmed and decide to pull back. One of the behaviors they engage in is, "I'm just going to get a pill, a medicine. I'm not going to take hard drugs. I'm gonna take a pill and just check out for a while, play some video games, watch a movie."

I think it's a perfect storm. I think you've got kids coming out of COVID who are really struggling with a lot of social anxiety, particularly a lot of depression, and an inability to cope with some of the big feelings they're having. I think you look at the isolation that's sort of magnified by social media, the sort of looking at everyone else's perfect life and feeling like yours is not so perfect, and then also the deadliness of the drug supply. And all those things come together, and it is a massive crisis that we're in right now as a country.

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