Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the same vein: It’s not young thugs that come in to medical centers trying to score painkillers; it’s middle-aged suburban moms. The former know where to buy on the street. It’s the latter that think of trying to lie to their doc. But in practice we tend to be more suspicious of the former.
Young adults (age 18 to 25) are the worst offenders of prescription abuse, the largest increase in opioid abuse has been in rural America, and men are 140% as likely to die from opioid abuse. So you have classified the greatest threat as female, suburban, and adult, but the statistics seem to indicate male, rural, and young adult. You are in danger of being pen tested.
It's also worth noting that "who dies from opioid overdose" and "who is more likely to use a doctor to get their fix" are two different discussions, not least of all because "who dies from opiate overdose" is unrelated to "source of opioid." In the period 2005 to 2015, the likelihood of a prescription drug being the initiating drug dropped in half, while the likelihood of it being heroin went up about four-fold (Cicero, Ellis, Kasper 2017).
As to women being the ones who walk into the medical center, note that the CDC's Drug Abuse Warning Network shows that the leading age groups to walk into an ED are women 25-34, 45-54, and 35-44 in that order (though the downward bump for 35-44 isn't really that big - it really is the center of the bell curve).
The big increase in "rural" areas is messy. The actual data shows "non-major urban", and lumps together "small urban" and "rural". Given how medically underserved rural areas are in the US, however, I'd say the anecdata that it's suburban is more consistent with "non-urban growth favoring the non-urban areas that actually have prescription-writers in them." (Cicero et al 2014)
The shift went from very-young inner city males getting heroin as their first drug to white middle-aged currently-as-many-women-as-men (but the velocity of growth is much higher in women) using scripts to, now, going back to heroin as scripts are harder to come by.
Lastly, the previous comment compared "young thugs" (15 yo inner-city males were the predominant opioid abusers in the 80s and 90s, and are traditionally the stereotype for opioid abuse) to the unsuspected-but-common addict that walks in the door today, analogous to the Mom PenTester in the original article. And, indeed, the opioid abuser of yester-year was not prescription-based: they weren't hitting up their physician. It seems like they were saying "the old stereotype that we suspect leads us to ignore this common and inconspicuous thing that is actually the risk." Which you've taken to mean "this common thing we don't adequately suspect is the defining description of what opioid abusers look like."