| You seem to have somewhat missed the point. You are correct that chronic pain patients are not a high overdose risk and that there is little to no benefit to treating their prescriptions with suspicion. (People who don't have to operate in a black market are MUCH safer.) Here is here you go wrong: > All of this goes to show that there is very little evidence of any sort of over-prescription of opiates in America. There is very clear evidence for over-prescription of opioids. There is very clear evidence that the risks of addiction were deliberately minimized by drug companies and doctors were incentivized to over-prescribe for as many off-label uses as possible. The issue is: Anyone who does develop a problematic addiction to pill they are prescribed tends to have their access cut off and are thus forced into the black market where their chances of overdose increase dramatically. Thus while users with drug prescriptions may not be overdosing at high rates, that does NOT mean that the black market overdoses are not directly causally related to the over-prescription of opioids. > Finally the sizable majority of prescription drug abusers in this country do not source from a doctor or the healthcare system at all. The vast majority get their drugs either from the black market or a friend or relative. They may not source directly from the healthcare system, but prescription diversion and fraud do indirectly source a lot of product from the the healthcare system. I suspect that crackdowns on this diversion helped spike the blackmarket opiod overdoses as it decreased the quality of the blackmarket supply (and thus increased the prevalence of Fentanyl.) |