Well, Rig, I think you need to look at how indigenous populations lived before the white colonizers arrived and before the traditional cultures of those indigenous populations were taken over and mostly destroyed by the industrially-based and consumer-driven philosophies that our civilization is built upon.

Traditional cultures gave those people a good education (in their own cultural terms....that is, they knew exactly what they needed to know to function consistently and effectively as what and who they were)......a stable set of social rules that everyone understood.....a society of people who had a strong sense of pride and identity.

That was all destroyed when the White colonizers came in and took over the indigenous areas by military force. The old ways fell by the wayside and the population was basically conscripted (or enslaved) as workers for European and North American industry and agriculture.

Areas of natural land that were once lived upon in a natural way by hunter-gatherers were devastated. The first thing that generally happened was that most of the trees got cut down. Then most of the animals got wiped out or severely reduced. The natural land got divided up into farming blocks that drove out all indigenous species from an area so that ONE crop could be grown there. The indigenous people who used to work with the powers of Nature to survive were now regimented to work against the powers of Nature by slaving away on farms or in industry. The industries and farms polluted the waterways. The industrial cities that were built polluted everything around them.

Is it surprising that poverty-stricken people shorn of their traditional cultures and traditional way of life, robbed of their identity and pride, and packed into ugly, overcrowed slums and many facing "unemployment" (something they had never faced in traditional life)...is it surprising that those people would lose their social cohesion and fall into alcoholism, drug abuse, breakdown of family life, and an irresponsibly high birth rate?