I'm a regular listener of Dr. Drew Pinsky's podcasts. Aside from his celebrity doctor status, he's an addiction medicine specialist and has treated addicts for decades. He knows a lot about opiod addiction and talks about it frequently; he's in the middle of making a documentary on it. One thing I've learned about the epidemic from him is that it is not primarily the result of a big pharma marketing push. The biggest factor was the right-to-be-pain-free movement of the 1990s. This was a movement initiated by lawsuits against doctors on the behalf of patients who wanted pain management via medication and happened back when it was very rare to get an opiod prescription. Doctors started getting sued for not providing their patients with enough pain relief and this resulted in a sea change in medicine. Pain management clinics emerged and the number of opiod prescriptions skyrocketed and the epidemic kicked off.
Sure, the pharmaceutical companies benefitted from this, but they didn't create this, attorneys did.
I live in Stockholm and there is pretty much no heroin here. Don't let people say "there is", there's not. Compared to any large european city, you never see strung out junkies anywhere.
I would love to know how much of the crime difference between a city like Dublin and Stockholm can be explained by heroin (just heroin - we don't have much crack or breaking-bad stuff). I expect it's the majority of crime and definitely the majority of homelessness. Heroin is like a viral infection. If it appears in a city, you have to quarantine off that area, clear the infection or it will spread and then it's just chronic management after that.
Obviously Norway is a different country from Sweden, but do you know what made them go down that route? Do they have a significantly bigger drugs problem there?
> Although most users still get their first taste from one of several prescription pills, heroin is now the single most common individual opioid taken by people first trying this class of drugs, the study found.
Or said another way: there are so many prescription opioids on the market that lead to addiction that no single one wins.
I don't buy the idea that the opioid epidemic was some natural and inevitable consequence of the economy or stress or whatever. "Oh look, some people addicted to opioids never took prescription drugs. See, it wasn't our fault after all! Now let us go back to the good old days where we bribed doctors to prescribe our stuff to everyone."