Bingo. The limited research done to assign the origin of the opioid addiction shows that perhaps 8-10% originates with a prescription, the rest is drug seeking behavior by folks already addicted to other substances who stumble across opioids. The public health response to this is presenting a message of “this can happen to anyone”, which is not true.
I am sympathetic to those who struggle with addiction, and believe there should be help available.
I think treating the addicts as blameless victims is shameful.
[The public health response to this is presenting a message of “this can happen to anyone”, which is not true.]
Absolutely correct. Opioids were first used for pain control during the Civil War which resulted in a lot of addicted veterans. However, laudanum (tincture of morphine) was available over the counter. In the 1870’s Sigmund Freud proposed cocaine as a treatment for opioid addiction. That worked well, didn’t it? I once met an elderly pharmacist in the 1960’s who told me that up until passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1934 Elixir of Terpinhydrate with Heroin was available without prescription for treatment of cough.
In the 1970’s Methadone was promoted to treat opioid addiction. Now there are lots of methadone addicts. Now buprenorphone is the magic medicine for this. Ir too is addicting.
Face it, humans LIKE opioids. There is nothing better for relief of acute or chronic pain. I have had lots of painful orthopedic issues in my life along with several surgeries. I was thankfully prescribed opioids to deal with the pain. When the pain was gone, I stopped the opioids. The drugs didn’t control me, I controlled them. With a lot of other people it doesn’t work that way.
When you drill down in the statistics you find that most overdose deaths are due to heroin, fentanyl, or opioids in combination with other drugs. Nobody overdoses on 5mg of Vicodin. All of these lawsuits are the results of greedy lawyers and politicians, but then I repeat myself.
You want to stop overdose deaths? Control our borders and put the cartels out of business. Its much easier to sue a legal pharmaceutical company than actually DO something about the problem.