“Religion is the opiate of the masses.” This is the great statement on religion by Marx. But it is never quoted in its entirety, because what he said was “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, it is the heart of a heartless world, it is the soul of a soulless place, it is the opiate of the masses.” SOURCE
In other words it is a way of numbing the pain of the world. What our modern world has done is that it has removed religion to fulfill the function of an actually healthy opiate, and it has replaced it with a real opium. . . We have a huge opioid crisis right now in this country. People are numbing themselves to the pain of the world because they have lost spiritual grounding in what the world is and what it always has been.
2018 data shows that every day, 128 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids. The misuse of and addiction to opioids—including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl—is a serious national crisis that affects public health as well as social and economic welfare. SOURCE