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On Feb. 13, 2022, the New York Times daily email discussed the rising tide of drug overdose fatalities in the United States. It started:
Drug overdoses now kill more than 100,000 Americans a year - more than vehicle crash and gun deaths combined.
Wow! Drug abuse causes more deaths than vehicles and guns combined! Why don't they advocate their favorite solution to gun deaths - banning drugs surely ought to solve the problem, right?
Not even the Times is that silly - they know that banning drugs hasn't helped and they won't even discuss the only known solution to the drug problem.
The Times gave us their view of the history of the problem:
In the 1990s, drug companies promoted opioid painkillers as a solution to a problem that remains today: a need for better pain treatment. Purdue Pharma led the charge with OxyContin, claiming it was more effective and less addictive than it was. ...
Doctors bought into the hype, and they started to more loosely prescribe opioids. Some even operated "pill mills," trading prescriptions for cash.
It turned out that people such as Rush Limbaugh, who were prescribed pain pills for legitimate purposes, could become addicted.
A growing number of people started to misuse the drugs, crushing or dissolving the pills to inhale or inject them. Many shared, stole and sold opioids more widely.
When the government noticed the problem, their solution was to sue the pill manufacturers for overly-effective marketing, even though all the prescriptions had been written by government-licensed physicians and fulfilled by government-approved pharmacies. The companies pointed out that only the government knew the total consumption of these drugs. Each company knew how many pills they were selling, but carefully kept their sales figures as private as they could.
Juries and lawsuit settlements have awarded billions of dollars in damages against the businesses which produced drugs which had been approved by the FDA. Perdue Pharma was put out of business. On top of that, the New York Post tells us about government cracking down on doctors who seemed to have over-proscribed opioids whether for pain management or not.
Emergency-room records reveal that very few overdose victims were being treated by a doctor for chronic pain, according to the Journal of the American Medical AssociationInternal Medicine. Thats not how they got hooked.
Illegal drugs cause nearly all overdose deaths, not drugs patients get from their doctor. Fentanyl (a man-made heroin-like drug), heroin and cocaine play the biggest roles in overdose deaths in New York City, according to the citys health data. Fewer than one in five overdose victims even had a prescription drug in their system, and it was virtually never the only drug.
As usual with government, there were undesirable consequences: It became very difficult for people who suffered from extreme pain to get enough treatment to keep them functioning in society and addicts switched from high-quality manufactured pills to illegal compounds which aren't made as carefully or as consistently.
Our government has much more control over our medical system than they admit. By threatening to cancel the medical licenses of anyone who prescribed "too many" painkillers, the government made it impossible for people who had unusual needs to get enough medicine to get through the day. This was the same technique the government used to make it impossible for doctors to prescribe ivermectin for covid suffers regardless of the doctor's views of how well the drug worked.
WIRED describes the unfortunate results in "The Pain Was Unbearable. So Why Did Doctors Turn Her Away?"
The article describes a government-operated NarxCare database which is supposed to list all painkillers each person receives. Whenever the government thinks a patient is getting too many painkillers, the doctor gets a nasty message. The usual response is to terminate the relationship with the patient for fear of losing a license to practice.
NarxCare - the system that inspired Kathryn's gynecologist to part ways with her - is Appriss' flagship product for doctors, pharmacies, and hospitals: an "analytics tool and care management platform" that purports to instantly and automatically identify a patient's risk of misusing opioids.
Appriss is adamant that a NarxCare score is not meant to supplant a doctor's diagnosis. But physicians ignore these numbers at their peril. Nearly every state now uses Appriss software to manage its prescription drug monitoring programs, and most legally require physicians and pharmacists to consult them when prescribing controlled substances, on penalty of losing their license. In some states, police and federal law enforcement officers can also access this highly sensitive medical information-in many cases without a warrant-to prosecute both doctors and patients. [emphasis added]
By raising the street price of competently-manufactured pills or making them unavailble to patients who "might" be getting "too many," the government forced addicts to turn to cheaper illegal drugs which aren't manufactured carefully at all. As the Post put it,
Doctors fear legal trouble, and are cutting off patients. Some of these turned-away patients, like 52-year-old bed-ridden Debra Bales, who had taken painkillers for years, resort to suicide in desperation.
Why are we not surprised that suffers such as Kathrun would turn to illegal drugs? Given the choice of maybe dying due to carelessly-compounded drugs or continuing to suffer unbearable agony, many people choose the low-quality route and die.
As with making gasoline harder to pump out of the ground, making high-quality pills harder to get raised the price, so addicts naturally turned elsewhere to save money. The Times explained
Opioid users moved on to more potent drugs, namely heroin. Some were seeking a stronger high, while others were cut off from painkillers and looking for a replacement.
Traffickers met that demand by flooding the U.S. with heroin. Then, in the 2010s, they started to transition to fentanyl, mixing it into heroin and other drugs or selling it on its own.
Drug cartels can more discreetly produce fentanyl in a lab than heroin derived from large, open poppy fields. Fentanyl is also more potent than heroin, so traffickers can smuggle less to sell the same high.
The Times blames the problem on lack of treatment for drug addiction.
Experts have a concise, if crude, way to summarize this: If it's easier to get high than to get treatment, people who are addicted will get high. The U.S. has effectively made it easy to get high and hard to get help.
This assumes, without saying so, that government-run drug addiction treatment actually works. This overly-simplistic idea totally ignores the possibility that some people suffer from so much pain that they need the drugs regardless of the danger of addiction.
Once again, we see that there is no problem that government can't make worse by throwing money and regulation at it.