There's also been a lot of problems with heroin abuse in my hometown in rural Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, a steel town outside of Pittsburgh.

I am not sure what the solution is, but the War on Drugs approach of criminalization needs to be replaced with rehabilitation. I've seen my friends' and high school classmates' lives get ruined by opioids (and these are good people with tremendous potential whose environment failed them), and I don't think throwing them behind bars is a solution.

I'm not sure you can rehabilitate opiate addicts. Very few of them ever stop using for good.

I think the best solution for the addicts would be lifetime prescriptions for buprenorphine (Suboxone). But then how do you prevent others from abusing the now abundant buprenorphine?

Relapse is common, regardless of the drug.

Opiate addicts can be rehabilitated.

Suboxone is much, much less euphoric than Oxycodone. Suboxone is abused much less.

People do abuse Suboxone though, and while it is not as bad as heroin, it can still ruin lives. I once watched this sad documentary, Reindeerspotting, about a Suboxone addict:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1584813/

I don't think drugs need to be very euphoric to have potential for abuse. Consider nicotine - it is not particularly pleasurable and yet people become very dependent on it.

Overeating can ruin lives. Is food inherently dangerous? People can misuse anything.

The question is not "Is Suboxone dangerous/addictive?", it is "Is Suboxone LESS dangerous/addictive?”.

The real problem is lack of economic opportunity. What is rehabilitation if there aren't any jobs to hold down?

The solution is to legalize cannabis. Lot's of potential for pain management, as well as to let people get high on something much safer.

Colorado legalized marijuana for recreational use and stores opened January 1, 2014. They are widespread in the state.

In 2014 and 2015, heroin overdose deaths in Colorado continued to increase over prior years. Among Colorado men, heroin overdose deaths in 2014 increased 31% over 2013. Among women, 16%.

http://gazette.com/overdosing-on-heroin-use-deaths-surge-in-...

Marijuana legalization does not appear to be a panacea to opiod abuse. Recreational marijuana use has a very different origin than prescription painkiller addiction (which often begins with usage to manage real pain, but spins into an addiction that then turns to heroin when the pills become too expensive).

But how did this compare to other states that did not legalize marijuana? Confounding variables can be quite pesky.

Or... legalize opiates? It's clear that the actual problem in stories like this article is purely caused by legality and the prices it entails. Opiates are really cheap (if you don't by brand-name ones). It'd be no big deal at all for people to use if they didn't pay these ridiculous prices. No stealing. No using dirty needles if they could just get them. And on and on.

Plus people wouldn't be as tempted to switch from properly produced pharma-grade pills to "street heroin", which can vary immensely in quality and purity. They do now because the pricing is out of control, due to the DEA's war on pain patients.

Yes, legalize opiates too (and everything else as well). I'd wager that a majority would be happy with using cannabis for pain management and recreation if it was cheap and available.

Oxyana has some poignant footage of the problem. Even in the short trailer.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/oxyana/69045041

I've grown increasingly leery of any story that relies on the anecdotes of three or four people/couples. I thought they'd died out in recent years because of how easily journalists could abuse the format.

This story relies on the anecdotes of one couple. Who apparently got convicted of taking down the county's phone lines. If they're real, they're very much an extreme.

Rather than reinforcing the narrative his entire story relies on them and I now distrust everything else he's said.

Stealing copper from phone and power lines isn't "extreme" at all. It happens with some regularity.