Deaths of despair were rising long before opioids

Long before opioids flooded communities, something else was quietly changing-and it may have helped set the stage for todays crisis. A new study finds that as church attendance dropped among middle-aged, less educated white Americans, deaths from overdoses, suicide, and alcohol-related disease began to rise. The trend started years before OxyContin appeared, suggesting the opioid epidemic intensified a problem already underway.