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Alcohol, drug, and suicide deaths. The only "researcher degree of freedom" I can see is that "alcohol deaths" might or might not be restricted to only alcoholism-based liver disease vs. e.g. DUIs.
It's real; these are pretty easy numbers to measure. And all three components are increasing, so it might make sense to hypothesize a single psychological root cause influencing them all ... but the one factor which is going way up, exponentially, is overdoses of synthetic opioids. There's "despair", but there's also "fentanyl is a hundred times more potent than morphine, carfentanyl is ten thousand times more". Those drugs are vastly eager to smuggle, easier to "cut" other drugs with, and easier to accidentally get a lethal dose of.
That wouldn't contradict the data. Despite some complications about changing selection effects, it still seems clear that the spike is all coming from people without college degrees.
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