This, in direct literal terms, was the argument made in favor of OxyContin.
1. “Pain is the fifth vital sign.” You are a Bad Doctor if you do not consider pain.
2. OxyContin is not habit-forming.
Also, a lot of people got started on Oxy after a surgery in which they were given it on their way out. They either started taking it and liked it, or didn’t take it and possibly had it diverted to acquaintances/family. With adderall you have to get it prescribed for ADHD or (more rarely) narcolepsy - of course it could still get diverted, but it’s not something that’s being routinely given to the general population like painkillers.
They're doing the same thing today with benzos, it's just less marked on society.
There's room in between full removal and liberal prescribing.
Getting proper pain management requires going to "pain specialists" which may or may not be pill mills since their entire business is now built on pain management rather than general medical care. Getting your medications is heavily restricted and complicated. You can't fill a script for more than a month. You can't fill more than 2-3 days before the date on the script. You can't stock up for a trip, and you can't even start the process of trying to get it early in a shortage situation. The fear of DEA / government means your normal providers won't touch it, and it means if you're dealing with a bad provider (say you wound up at a pill mill and you're trying to get out) other providers won't want to take you on. It means if you've been mis-managed, rather than trying to help you wean down, you're more likely to have a new provider cut you off cold turkey and then treat you as an addict when your withdrawl symptoms kick in. An uncomfortable number of addicts have the same basic history, of being put on pain meds for some reason or another and being cut off cold turkey by some other provider without consideration for their current dependency levels or their actual pain needs. And that doesn't even begin to get into how impossible it becomes to get proper help if you are an addict.
Addiction is an awful thing, and it's an issue that needs to be dealt with. Dealing with it by making it harder for non-addicts and addicts alike to get the help they need is not the answer.
Accidentally getting someone who had no intention of abusing it addicted without recognizing it was/is the much bigger issue and availability doesn’t really help that.
There are a few root causes: telemedicine rapidly increasing prescriptions, the mentioned Teva production issues. But one of the main problems is that the DEA tries to project the amount of adderall that’s allowed to be made/imported per year, which makes it so companies can’t quickly scale up production or hold inventories to smooth over supply issues.
IMO, the DEA should not have any input whatsoever in how much of a medicine can be produced or imported per year. Why should people who need medicine suffer just in case someone else might abuse it?
It’s hard enough as it is to manage these prescriptions because of them being controlled substances. Now it’s 10x harder because I have to play middle man between pharmacy and physician (if they only have 15mg XR in stock I can’t just get that filled to replace my 15mg IR without resending a prescription - by the time my physician sends something over they might be out of stock of that dose already) and pound pavement to find pharmacies with stock at all. Plus you have to deal with all the pharmacy staff that’s pissed at all the other people in the same boat calling in to try to get their prescriptions filled, on top of the regular baseline judgment against people with controlled substance prescriptions