Expert sounds alarm on new wave of US opioids crisis

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I guess the central point is that us very hard to distinguish between genuine and fraudulent use cases; in absence of infallible diagnostics, doctors can choose to move the know to "stricter" (decreasing fraudulent use, but making genuine use much harder) or "looser" (viceversa). I see a similar problem with mental diseases, where the common pattern nowadays is 1) get convinced that you are neurodivergent 2) iterate n doctors until you find the diagnosis you like.

Indeed. It’s created a system where everyone’s scared. So those who need it legitimately often cannot get it. Which honestly is a false sense of security at this point as it’s easier to get these drugs on the street rather than legitimately through a doctor and that’s what most now do. If anything, the abrupt disappearance of legitimate pharmacy grade drugs made way for the current problem Fentnyl. Taking away and restricting OxyContin literally made the issue worse. Almost no one can get their hands on pharmaceutics opioids and yet the overdose rate has skyrocketed! People just don’t learn… You take something away and people only tend to want it more. Prohibition simply does not work and we have years of experience and history to show this time and time again and yet not a single thing has changed. Never see any new approaches or ideas to fix this issue because it goes far deeper than drugs themselves. People want to self medicate because they suffer, but we haven’t discussed why so many suffered and what we could do about it. Probably because the answer to that question isn’t going to be easy and hard work will be involved.

How does that stop OD?

I see this as analogous to the Dust Bowl, where the politicians and coastal elite ignored or dismissed the growing problem until it was too big to ignore.

- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1000-mile-long-sto...

-https://mallhistory.org/items/show/274

100 years and more information than ever, yet we have’t figured out this out-of-sight, out-of-mind problem.