Why Money Doesn’t Protect Anyone From Addiction

Suniya Luthar, a psychologist who has spent more than two decades studying this exact question, first stumbled onto the pattern almost by accident. In a 1999 study published in Development and Psychopathology, comparing suburban, affluent tenth-graders with inner-city students of the same age, she found the affluent group reported substance use at higher rates than their lower-income peers, the opposite of what conventional assumptions would predict.

A follow-up study, published in Child Development in 2002, examined 302 sixth and seventh graders in an affluent Northeastern community where the median family income was well above the national average. The findings pointed to two specific factors driving the pattern: intense achievement pressure, both internalized and coming directly from parents, and isolation from adults, particularly a lack of closeness with parents during the after-school hours when supervision mattered most. Substance use among boys in the study was also linked to social popularity, meaning it wasn’t happening on the margins. It was often happening at the center of the social world these kids were navigating.

Luthar has continued tracking these patterns into adulthood in the years since, and the trend has held: students from high-achieving schools and affluent backgrounds show troubling rates of substance use and addiction well into young adulthood, not just during the specific stress of adolescence. In her own writing on the follow-up work, she’s described being genuinely surprised by how persistent the pattern turned out to be, rather than something teens simply grew out of once school pressure eased.