Agreed. Unless you're a cancer patient on palliative care, turning to opiods for long term pain management (particularly as a first line of defense, which so often seems to be the case) strikes me as completely insane.

Part of the problem is that, prior to the Oxy epidemic, the reality is doctors were probably under-managing pain, particularly for chronic pain sufferers.

Unfortunately, the reaction (again, in part due to drug company marketing) was to swing the other way and over-prescribe these drugs.