Boring and terrifying, the endless tedium of the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered shifts in many Americans’ substance-use habits—and mostly for the worse. But at least in New York, COVID-19 has cut down on cocaine habits. Instead of disappearing into dingy club bathrooms, New York partygoers are staying home and smoking cannabis.
Across the country, the pandemic has seen fatal drug overdoses rise in areas already hit hard by opiate-related fatalities. In San Francisco, overdoses killed more than 621 people in 2020, almost four times as many as COVID-19; as of Monday, the coronavirus has killed “only” 194 in San Francisco County. And doctors and researchers are openly worrying that Americans are drinking more, and drinking more often.
Some researchers theorize that the anxious and lonely tedium of quarantines and lockdowns compel isolated people to start using more substances in order to cope with the stress of living through the horrors of a once-in-a-century pandemic, and doing so mostly alone—and this is partially true.
