In the olden days the despairing, the bored and the not-wrapped-too-tight were efficiently culled by wars foreign and domestic, everywhere.

Religious frenzies, naughty things that grew in the woods--anything will do if you want to lose your mind and escape from your daily life.

I had a Year of Living Dangerously, and fortunately it didn't kill me--in any one of many possible ways--and I'm glad I survived to eventually get smarter.

But we all need to get smarter if we survive any of our idiotic moments, and idiotic moments, unfortunately, are endemic to the human species. The kid who dies from the fentanyl tablet he didn't know was fentanyl might just as easily have died from reckless driving or diving into the local quarry pool on a dare.

There's no substitute for good parenting--beginning pre-conception. Why are so many of these stories bound together by the common thread of depressed children? Why are so many children so depressed even before puberty?

In my view focusing on opioids is finding the easy villain. Scriptures of all cultures have preached against intoxicating substances, going back thousands of years.

The unhappy truth is that we are pack animals and once the pack grows too large, too many people just cannot find a useful place for themselves. There's no easy cure for that.