1. Some people are in chronic pain. They have shattered discs, nerve damage, Dr. Gregory House Disease, etc. They have conditions that current medical science can’t sufficiently treat. For them, it’s either mindnumbing chronic pain, or opiods.

2. For doctors, there are two ends to the opiod issue’s spectrum. At one end, you have corrupt doctors who do literally nothing but run shell clinics that dispense opiods for the right price (or, as poor call it: deal drugs). At the other end you have conscionable doctors who care about following the rules so much that they prescribe extra strenth tylenol for infected, abscessed molars. This actually happened to a friend of mine, who was prescribed three of these things to tide him over until his dental surgery that was a week away. He nearly went completely insane from the pain.

3. The fact that districts with the highest rates of opioid addiction were the most likely districts to vote for Donald Trump in 2016 may have not been a coincidence. There has been a great deal of research on the relationships between addicitons and decision making. On the coasts, adderall prescriptions are written at vastly higher rates than in the middle of the country. Amphetamines are related to more calculated, machine-like decisions being made. New York City voted very, very blue. Opioids are related to bolder, riskier decisions that favor shaking things up to make things better, hence the extremely high correlation between districts hit the hardest by the opioid epedemic and votes for Donald Trump. Neither of these are inherently right — it just illustrates the fact that drugs have a social engineering utility to them, which opens prescriptions and black markets up to a whole other — and very underreported — set of actors with agendas.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154616301620?via%3Dihub

4. The more sensationalized and amplified the opioid epedemic gets, the worse it is for addicts. The single largest predictor of relapse is isolation, and receiving a lot of attention for an addiciton is — although intended as support — very isolating. For the same reason, jail is an insanely poor way to treat addicts.

5. There’s a reason that the research chemical — “synthetic drug” feels like a bizarre term, to me, because any non-holistic drug is synthetic — market is so popular, and it’s not abuse — it’s class stratification. The more affluent the person, the easier it is for them to get an adderall prescription to be more productive at work, a benzodiazepine ‘script to relax and get to sleep on time, a vicodin ‘script for their herniated disc, and so on. Meanwhile, economically disadvantaged co-workers are expected to keep up with this level of productivity — regardless as to whether it’s healthy, it becomes the norm. China’s there to fill that niche.

I’m not sure where the right answer lies in all of this, but it involves being simultaneously less draconian toward drug use, while also employing better, more universally applied oversight of drug distribution. Which…. that’s a confusing nut to crack. There’s probably no great solution, but the one that contributes the least to socially engineering the public for either profits or politics is probably the one to look for.

If foreign countries have to deal with it as well, let them handle it in their own way.

How do we get people like that? I mean, what creates that sort of horribleness in the human race?

Well, one can hope, right?

One should keep a balanced perspective with these issues.