God, Religion, and America’s Addiction Crisis

The pictures are chilling and heartbreaking: zombie-like adults passed out in the front seat of a car, overdosed on opioids, a small child belted into the infant seat in the back, safe from traffic accidents but not from his or her own parents.

America, in short, has an addiction problem. The statistics on deaths from drug overdoses collected by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—more than a half-million people between 2000 and 2015 alone—are so appalling that one would be almost grateful to find a journalistic takedown calling them into question. Since 1999, deaths involving heroin and prescription opioids in particular have quadrupled, to the point where they constitute six out of every ten deaths from drug overdoses.

But is drug addiction the only widespread addiction? Compared with the carnage it has wrought—according to a recent study conducted by the New York Times, drug overdoses are now the number-one (!) cause of death of Americans under fifty—other forms of addiction seem relatively minor. And yet some students of the phenomenon argue that serious addiction of all kinds is much more common than we think. And these days, perhaps surprisingly, Exhibit A is addiction to technology: mainly in the form of tablets, smartphones, and online games.