A great many people want to be happy and really don’t have a clue what being happy means and certainly they’re clueless how to find happiness so they just rush at every opportunity to have fun at whatever opportunity they can find and afford. I recall a post card from some amusement park with the picture of a large family holding big drinks, satchels full of junk and waiting in line for something and the caption read ARE WE HAVING FUN YET? I’ve been to Hershey’s Park and Six Flags and a couple of casinos and for the most part the people I saw were desperately hoping they might get lucky and find some happiness soon but the chances were slim. And getting high is likely much cheaper and more readily available than a day with Mickey or a slot machine but still there’s just more disappointment re the fun/happiness. Of course once hooked on a good drug the desire for relief from detox becomes much more demanding than the search for happiness ever was.
Amen, I say it every week in my class (I am a engineering professor currently teaching econometrics to grad students)…correlation is not the same as causation.
I also usually share this website with my students: https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
I’m pointing out that lots of people with mental illness self medicate. IMO, it’s impossible to know how many do that because society treats mental illness differently than the flu. I don’t know about your medical plans, but the ones I’ve been associated with have only recently started to pay for treatment of mental illness. Admit to mental illness at work, and you just got fired in many places. And since you posted a number, please substantiate your assertion about the statistics of self medication. I realize that lots of people get high (low?) because they like to.