People in chronic pain now get to live their lives without any relief at all. They get ignored my news orgs who are obsessed with amplifying an opioid hysteria narrative.
Go Gov.
There's not (as far as I've found) currently any consistent threshold for how much of a given opioid you have to take for how long to develop an addiction. Some people might be able to take a high dose for an extended interval and not blink. Some people might take a much lower dose and have a very bad time indeed. (For that matter, I've known some people who got IV opioids with no effect. Biochemistry is wild.)
So I don't think it's reasonable to argue "opioids are safe if you follow the guidelines" and "OTC pain meds are unsafe [if you ignore the guidelines]" - both have risks that you can try to mitigate by following the guidelines given, but unknown factors can result in it still having negative outcomes.
A couple months ago, I had minor (in absolute terms) surgery which resulted in a good deal of pain; the doctor asked if I wanted a prescription for opioids, I said yes, it was sent in, no further questions.
Am I saying people in chronic pain don't now have issues? No, I have no direct experience with that situation.
But it's still quite possible for people to get opioids sometimes.
Assassinating a Chinese citizen in China would be a huge overreach and a major violation of sovereignty. Not to mention it wouldn't stop the drug trade.
Instead of looking at the Liberal Hegemony playbook for a solution, they should de-criminalize and regulate. During prohibition many people were dying from additives/impurities in bootleg alcohol, now we don't have that problem.
What the actual policy should be towards drugs is downstream of helping the public understand they are being misled systematically, and have been being misled since school.
One example is fentanyl is killing us by the thousands every year. We know who the guy is who owns the factor that’s providing most of the fentanyl and precursors to the cartels. He lives in China and runs an also legit chemical factory. He commits the crime right in the main factory in the open. We politely asked China to arrest him, but they said no. No real political pressure to do anything, no assassinations, nothing. Thousands dead every year.