[duskwuff]

> An attack with e.g. a biological weapon could cause, on a single day, 1000x the cumulative number of deaths we had over the past decade.

Perhaps. But it's virtually a certainty that opioid overdoses will kill tens of thousands of people in the US this year. (The most reliable recent figure I can find was ~30k in 2015.) Meanwhile, a terrorist attack in the US that kills hundreds of people -- let alone tens of thousands -- is a relatively low-probability event...

[averagewall]

You'd need quite a lot of biological weapons. 1000 x 100 terrorism deaths is still on the order of magnitude of the number of road deaths in 10 years. So a 100,000 people killing bomb in the US every few decades isn't really that bad.

[exclusiv]

You have to acknowledge that someone abusing opiods doesn't infringe on another's freedom but a terrorist attack does.

Not saying we shouldn't do anything about this drug epidemic but your comparison is fundamentally unsound.

[duskwuff]

That seems like a veiled sort of victim-blaming to me. The entire premise that "someone abusing opioids doesn't infringe on another's freedom" ignores the role of the medical system (and of the drug companies named in this lawsuit!) in leading patients into opiate addiction through poorly handled pain management.

Moreover, addiction is fundamentally a disease which acts upon the sufferer's ability to make free, rational decisions. In a very real sense, the addiction itself is "infringing on the freedom" of the addict, even if it hasn't killed them yet.

[exclusiv]

Unless you are injected against your will or force fed then you still had the freedom to not take it in the first place. Everyone knows how addicting these things are. There are alternative pain relieving options available too. Nobody cares about smokers getting addicted although they do care about public smoking because it infringes on their right to clean air.

[scottlamb]

> Everyone knows how addicting these things are.

No, the point of the lawsuit is that they don't (or didn't). The article makes that clear through quotes such as: "We believe that the evidence will show that these pharmaceutical companies purposely misled doctors about the dangers connected with pain meds that they produced."

> Nobody cares about smokers getting addicted although they do care about public smoking because it infringes on their right to clean air.

Public smoking is a focus of conversation today, but the analogous 1990s big tobacco lawsuits centered on the medical costs of treating smokers. See wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...

[exclusiv]

The lawsuit might contend people don't know they are addicting but that's not reality.