naccato

Yeah, that's a fair point. I agree that prescribing opioids is overkill in most cases, and is surely creating more addicts, but what I really take issue with is how we've been completely overlooking the environmental factors in addiction. This paradigm of reducing access to drugs to reduce addiction rates has prevailed for a long time, with pretty dire consequences. There's certainly more to this than the chemical component.

The sad truth is, the U.S. is a country that emphasizes punishment over rehabilitation, and we've brought this upon ourselves by isolating people and banning access to substances that they've become dependent on. The solution here is not complex: give addicts safe access to the substances they're addicted to and resources for improving their situation. It's disheartening, to say the least, that one of the main strategies for dealing with this is apparently "reducing medical prescriptions of opioids". People are in pain -- they need to be helped.

I highly recommend the book Chasing the Scream, for anyone who's looking for a primer on the War on Drugs. It traces the hysteria around drug use back to the 1930s, when race panic was used to push forward prohibition in the face of mounting evidence against that strategy.