[at_a_remove]

You'll pardon me for saying something that sounds a little "woo," but what will enlighten you the most is regarding Group B (who get opioids or benzos or whatever and suffer addiction) as a subset of Group A (who need treatment and medication but aren't getting it), namely that Group B is not getting something in their lives which they desperately need.

Then you may see the unitary flaw in the system, at perhaps a larger scale, wherein people are not receiving what they need. One "right-sized" problem, not two problems. Why addiction, or better, why addiction now, what has caused the rise in such? Whatever that need was, were it met, would prevent addiction and we might then cease adding yet one more special of lenses, mirrors, and films to our ever-evolving panopticon, one more trackable in the Salesforce of the Surveillance State.

We need to look at some reasons as to why people can see, say, Tranq in Philadelphia and say, "That looks like my best option, there."

[itsnotafight]

I don’t disagree that addiction indicates a lack of something broadly related to “care”. I just take issue with claiming “it is necessarily better that people in pain receive care, and addicts do what addicts do”.

If this is indeed a spectrum (certainly debatable), with increased access definitionally increasing addiction, the argument that one side of the spectrum is strictly better is wrong.