As a resident I encountered a book written in the 60s by the Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mass General (IIRC). As I recall the title was Pain and the Neurosurgeon. It is huge. It describes something like 400 different operations for the relief of chronic pain. Again, if you treat chronic pain with opiates you will achieve only one thing. You create a desperate addict. In a society where his addiction makes him a criminal. I disagree with the model that would insist he has a “disease”. An addict is just someone, like the rest of us, who has found a way he desires to pass his time. Most of us have goals, dreams, ambitions and so are much more resistant to the allure of simply “artificially feeling good” all the time and prefer to feel good accomplishing something. Why do we allow politicians to burden us with the exorbitant cost of criminalizing these people? Should we also criminalize people who waste their lives in mom’s basement playing vidya? Seriously. To be consistent we should criminalize anyone who is “wasting their life”, shouldn’t we? Who gets to decide? Because I can think of a bunch of people who are wasting lives. Maxine Waters. Sheila Jackson Lee. I could go on and on.