Oh, So you are one of those guys.
My point was “My is this happening now with Opiods?”
Not alcohol, or what every you ingest or inject to make you not deal with reality. Why are prescription opiods the current drug of choice when they were not before? These are not being sold on the street, it is coming from Walgreens.
I don't know or care. I'm sure there are psychologists who could hold forth on that topic ad nauseum.
I only know that what goes on between a doctor, his patient, and his pharmacist has no business being invaded by Government and an ever-expanding police state based on arbitrary law.
Such problems are treated with education and rehabilitation, not domination and incarceration.
As with any other substance of known strength, it takes a lot of ignorance and irresonsibility to kill yourself with something "legal", and although there may be high incidences of addiction, the vast majority of opiate deaths are either suicide, or from taking street drugs of unknown strength.
I personally know of several people who have died of OD's, and in every single case it was from turning to the street—in some cases because that became the only avenue for the person's "medication", "relief", "escape", "recreation", their "pursuit of happiness", or whatever else you'd like to call it.
Additionally, I know of many cases where people who have perfectly legitimate needs for pain management are robbed of their dignity—not by the medication, but by a paranoid bureaucratic leviathan that makes legally obtaining their medication a humiliating logistical nightmare.
This whole hysterical "epidemic" is about power, profits, and control, nothing more, and the wealthy and connected—like Rush Limbaugh, for instance—live by one set of medical rules, while the "riff raff" are treated like criminal dogs.
Prohibition doesn't work, period. When alcohol Prohibition was passed, it, too, was in response to an "epidemic" of alcoholism and assicuated domestic abuse. Predictably, it was driven primarily by emotionalism, in this case women—who had recently gained the right to vote. And when they did, they went on a crusade to save the men of America from themselves.
Did it work? No. Did alcohol addiction go down? Sure. But the problems created far outweighed the benefits—not to mention the minor fact that the law was Tyrannical.
IMHO, nobody who calls himself a "small government" conservative—or believes in Constitutional rights—can morally (or even Constitutionally) support the ever-expanding police state which is necessary to enforce this nation's contraband laws. One cannot be a Prohibitionist and believe in minimal government, because enforcing such laws must involve the creation of a massive police state which must trample numerous Unalienable and Constitutional rights. Period.
The so-called "War on Drugs" is an abject failure, and the more that authoritarian solutions are imposed, the worse the situation gets. Due to draconian "mandatory minimum" sentencing laws, for example—promugated the runaway regulatory nanny-statists—you see murderers and violent criminals who serve less time than some poor sap who gets caught with a handful of the "wrong" pills. That's not Justice by any stretch of the imagination.
Another thing that causes such personal destruction—massive property crime—is the artificially high prices that are created due to the fact that so much of the activity ends up occurring on the black market.
Prohibition will always fail, just as it utterly failed with alcohol—and for identical reasons.
Education and rehabilitation, not legislation. Nobody—not one American—should face prison time merely for possessing the wrong plant, liquid spirits, chemical, or medicine. That's a Tyrannical travesty, and from it flows a multitude of evils which far exceed any potential benefits.
When somebody engages in negligence, violence, or fraud due to their addiction or intoxication—in other words, when they commit an actual crime—that's when Law becomes legitimate and ceases to be arbitrary.
The more challenging solutions—the ones which don't involve draconian shortcuts and authoritarian policies—are the only ones that will ever have a chance of succeeding—and they also carry the additional benefit of not being Tyrannical or unconstitutional. I'll never believe any different.