Some thoughts about the "opioid crisis"

Have I got this right?

Big Pharma, or at least some province thereof, with the connivance of government regulators, unleashed an epidemic of opioid addiction. Lot's of hard-working regular folks got addicted to their government sanctioned legally prescribed opiate derivatives.

This raised an outcry. In response, governments have leaned on doctors to pull back on those prescriptions. So the hundreds of thousands or millions of people who got hooked on prescription opioids had a stark choice. Go cold turkey or go to the streets.

Not everyone is up to the cold turkey thing.

Whether you want to call it connivance or simple ineptitude, there's no denying the government played a role in this addiction crisis, and the overdose crisis today is the direct result of forcing those folks onto the streets.

Say what you want about Big Pharma, but at least they're not selling stuff that some college drop-out mixed in his apartment. They've got the top chem grads working for them in the most sophisticated labs in the world.

I heard an interview on the CBC the other day with a guy who was addicted to prescription pain-killers for 30 years. All along, he managed to be a productive tax-paying member of society. Then the government cracks down on opioid prescriptions, and his life becomes a shambles. In short order he loses his job, his family, and so far he's barely survived two overdoses.

How is this right?

The humane course of action here would be to severely curtail new opioid scrips, to stop the further growth of the addicted population, but for God's sake, lets show some mercy to the people who our medical-pharmaceutical industry already got hooked.

Do what it takes to keep them safe.