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The recent dramatic increase in “deaths of despair” (suicides, fatal drug overdoses, and deaths due to alcoholism) is directly connected to the decline in organized religion in the United States—and to the repeal of “blue laws” that once prohibited some commerce on Sundays in observance of the Christian Sabbath.
This is according to a 2022 study by economists Tyler Giles, Daniel Hungerman, and Tamar Oostrom called "Opiates of the Masses: Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American Religion."
Over the past two decades, note the researchers—who are from Wellesley College, the University of Notre Dame, and Ohio State University—the death rate from drug poisonings in the United States has tripled. At the same time, the suicide rate and the rate of alcoholic liver disease have increased by 30 percent....