Pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of money trying to increase the demand for these drugs: marketing and sales reps. In the case of Oxycontin, it even looks like they used deceptive practices to do so: marketing the drug as effective at treating 12-24 hours of pain even when this is not the case: http://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/

Seems to me like something similar could happen if these companies were allowed to commercialize drugs like fentanyl and heroin, so in a sense this article is making arguments relevant to demand.

However, I do agree that more should be done to try and curb the demand d for drugs. What do you think would be some good policies that could do that?