Your view looking into the US may be a little flawed, to be honest. Opioids are also regulated in the US. No one gets them for headaches. Doctors recommend Tylenol and Advil for most aches and pain.

The times when my wife and I have received Opioids: broken ankles, back injuries from weight lifting, and after c-sections. I didn't receive them when I broke my collarbones (I've broken both, on separate occasions).

> I think Bayer (manufacturer of Aspirin) being a German company...

Tylenol is produced by a huge American company: Johnson and Johnson. Advil is produced by another huge American company: Pfizer.

I get fiorecet for migraines after the doctor tried me out on a few other preventative medications which either didn't work or had side effects like making me as sleepy as taking two Benadryl.

There as needed and I can go months between refilling the script sometimes but it's still for headaches

I mean, I get migraines too, and they're completely debilitating, but I would personally just classifiy them as something very different than a headache. Undersells just how horrible they can be.

Yea, wasnt sure if the OP was including them or not. Some people do when they say "headaches". If I dont take any medication before getting a migraine and it goes all the way I am incapable of even moving

Bayer is the original manufacturer and trademark holder for Heroin, so I imagine they could have entered the opioid game if they wanted to. However, they might still remember the 100 years old lesson of what comes from marketing opioids to the general population.

"And frankly so, Germany doesn't have an opioid problem."

You are very uninformed obviously. As far as i know for my town, Paderborn (NRW), we have about 1.000 people receiving opioid replacement drugs under government supervision (~90.000 city population).

> As far as i know for my town, Paderborn (NRW), we have about 1.000 people receiving opioid replacement drugs under government supervision (~90.000 city population).

Whoa, that's an outsized proportion - entire Germany has 77k people in methadone substitution: http://www.bfarm.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Bundesopiumstell...

Also, the numbers are 500 methadone substituters (of total ~1k opiate users) in Paderborn (http://www.nw.de/lokal/kreis_paderborn/paderborn/paderborn/1...). What would interest me is the background why ~1% of the population are opiate abusers, though.

While opioid abuse is rising, yes even in Germany, situations are not really comparable. In the US 20.5 Million people have a substance abuse disorder. Of which 2M have a problem involving prescription pain relievers, and roughly 600k people are addicted to Heroin. [0] For Germany data on this matter is generally less available, but reports range from 1.5M to 1.9M users of prescription drugs for Germany, that number includes sleep-aids and Benzos as well though. Zolpidem based drugs actually make up for 3/4 of German prescription drug abuse. [1] The official drug report mentions 160k high-risk opioid users and 77k in substitution programmes. [2] (That's actually far far less than the 1/90 rate you report for your city. Talking about uninformed...) Also for comparison of the problem, let's look at the death rates in the US [3] and Germany [2]: 33k vs 1.2k now in relation to the population (age 15-64):

US: 0.000160 %

Germany: 0.0000226415 %

US death rate is 7 times higher than the German, while population is only 4 times bigger. That said, a look at the opioid users in Germany (160k) and US (2M+600k) is way clearer. We are talking about 16 times the abuse rate in the US compared to Germany. So yeah, Germany doesn't have an opioid problem, compared to the US.

So while Germany has heroin addicts, the US actually has a drug addict training program running. In the US there are 290M opioid prescriptions per year. [4] And while Germany doesn't have those outstanding numbers, Big Pharma is pushing for change in Germany [5 (German)]

[0]: https://www.asam.org/docs/default-source/advocacy/opioid-add...

[1]: http://www.dw.com/en/medication-abuse-a-growing-concern-in-g...

[2]: http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/publications/4528/T...

[3]: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/index.html

[4]: https://addiction.surgeongeneral.gov/surgeon-generals-report...

[5]: http://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/diagnose/oxycodon-fentanyl-...