I though it was brought partially by wealth gaps and hopelessness. The drugs epidemic in the US is now at least 50 years old (maybe a bit better between 2000 and 2008?). Two generations were raised while it existed and that more that anything banalized drugs. Fentalyn might be the latest one to trend, but it was Opioid, Meth, Cocaine, Crack and LSD before, all the way to the 70's.

I suppose Isolation during Covid might play a role, but I have not seen any stats relating drugs and the pandemic so far.

A culture hyping 70-hours weeks and over-employment as solutions to cost-of-living issues is not healthy, and drugs are just one of the symptom.

Fentalyn isn't really the problem. The need for drugs to escape/cope is.

I think there might also some incentive to pad media runtimes for streaming services to make it look like they have a lot of content. And a drug induced high sequence is cheap to film.

Lots of content that should be 90min or 2 hours at most is now 4 hours or more.

I simply stop watching or fast forward through that nonsense. If I wanted to see people get high and drunk over and over, there are more entertaining venues.