[yborg]

Read the article. It's economic - the makers of these opiate drugs have large marketing budgets they employ to encourage physicians to prescribe these addictive drugs and there has been essentially no governmental oversight on these marketing efforts because these marketing budgets also fund lobbying activities.

There have been a few prosecutions of individual sales/marketing people for knowingly supplying pill mills, but it's just a cost of business expense for large pharma companies.

[panzer_wyrm]

Yeah but the problem goes deeper. Not sure how to properly describe it. The initial sentence people waking up to take painkillers is unbelievably weird. If you manage to fell asleep - then the pain itself is unlikely to wake you up.

What the farma company did was exploit already existing predisposition of people to take painkillers. They were working on fertile ground.

I don't know - having large population of people that need constant painkillers in their day to day life is just strange. Abusing the people is despicable. But why did this population existed in the first place?