You're looking at the symptom rather than the disease.

The despair is the disease. Drug and alcohol use are from people self-medicating their symptoms.

If anyone cared to address this problem, they'd look at what causes despair. That despair is often from economic and social distress.

Instead, everyone is outraged up on a media and politically driven moral panic about pharmaceutical medication that happens to be rarely abused and is almost never addictive (fewer than 0.1% chance of becoming addicted to prescribed painkillers, study on over 640,000 patients, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27400458).