Our culture seems to excuse drug- and other risk-taking in white middle- and upper-middle-class kids, especially young men. The same liberties, when taken by rural poor whites or people of color—wherever they live—come across as more desperate, born of fundamental wants or needs that can’t be satisfied. But as I’ve come to learn, gauged strictly by drug use, there is no less urgency and desperation in America’s middle and upper classes today.
