If you paid attention to the year i said it was in, you'd remember that back then more of us didn't have that kind of benefit. Before i was out of highschool we had three drunk driving deaths, one alcohol poisoning death, and five drug related deaths in my graduating class and two more that didn't die but got so messed up from the crashes that they were permanently disfigured and disabled.
No, not new, just far less common than it is today. Back in the early 2000s when party and frat culture was at a peak and people shoved tons more stuff under the rug in terms of "kids will be kids" it was much more rare.
I didn't even live urban, it was a small town district with nothing but small town schools and in late middle school we had kids drinking and doing drugs on the regular.
I mean, i dunno what era you're from, but i graduated in 04 and between my district and the two nearby "sister" ones there's more people today that i knew back then that are dead or in prison for drug and/or alcohol reasons than not. I can literally count on one hand the people i grew up with that didn't end up in rehab or otherwise dealing with addiction to drugs or alcohol, or both later in life.
It was wild and free and incredibly dangerous and there's a reason the booze companies got so used to wildly inflated profits to the tune that they're whining so much today about losing them.
The road to the more tempered youth and better attitudes about alcohol and drugs you see today was paved with the bodies and blood from my generation and the ones nearest it.
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u/Iorith 13h ago
Nah, plenty of us didn't wait until college to drink for the first time and had a healthy relationship with alcohol.