Except that its nonsense. People know what opiates are. If you keep taking them and dont stop, you get physical withdrawal. That wont happen over night and its not "the worst sickness imaginable". And unless you did something even more stupid then switching to methadone it will be over in a few days.

It is quite simple, at some point, you decided to continue taking them despite knowing this to be problematic.

I would also like to add, that i have met very few addicts who blame the drug. Its most of the time relatives who like the story of their loved one getting tricked.

If it was only the fear of withdrawal, the opioid crisis would be solved next week. Literally. But the unfortunate problem is that people relapse. Because what ever made them take opioids every day didnt get fixed with a withdrawal. And if your life still sucks, its very easy to go back.

I think it's

> 1) Why do people take opiods the first time

that the GP is getting at. While doctors over-prescribing opiates is definitely a thing (esp. in the US), I'm not convinced that many people get hooked on opiates due to partying. I think it's more commonly:

"Used as an escape from a life that is unmanagable for some reason"

That's not conspirational. There's good evidence to show that life circumstances have a big effect on both initially becoming addicted and success when attempting recovery. The answer to this might look like a better welfare state or similar.

There are plenty of other fairly common reasons that don't involve simple escapism, with young people it's just as likely to be simple peer pressure or experimentation. It also doesn't help that it's common to treat drug highs as some sort of enlightening experience that needs to be experienced to understand.

I think it'd be more likely that someone discovers opioids mask their pain while using them for legitimate purposes. After that is when gaming the doctor, street buys, and finally substitutions take place.

>Society is not broken and we don’t need weird conspiratorial explanations for any of this.

Life expectancy plummeting through deaths of despair, juxtaposed with widespread addiction (as much to drugs without physical dependence as opiates).

"investigating systems in their totality rather than focusing on isolated interactions within them" is not inherently conspiratorial. It's far weirder to suggest that "more people want to party for no particular reason" or "more doctors prescribe pain meds for no particular reason" than it is to suggest reasons that might contribute (say, "more people are suffering from chronic pain than before as the disparity between productivity and wage has widened" or "pharmaceutical companies are naturally incentivized to sell as much of their product as possible and those incentives may occasionally drive morally dubious decisions").

You make a good point regarding incentive structures in pharma - but this is nothing like what OP was saying. OP is asking for a “Frommian psychoanalytic approach,” whatever that is.

Your point about chronic pain increase is totally implausible. Automation of manual labor should result in less chronic pain, not more. The problem here is overprescription, and it’s my fault that my comment didn’t make that clear.

As regards:

> It's far weirder to suggest that "more people want to party for no particular reason"

I never said that. The number of people who want to party and have no foresight has remained constant. But access to opiods (and their normalization) has skyrocketed, due to aforeforementioned over-prescription.

Sorry, I missed this reply when you made it 11 days ago. Happy to respond:

Automation of manual labor _should_ result in a _lot_ of benefits to workers. But here's the thing: Automation is, largely, capital. And under capitalism, ownership of capital is private. That means that the benefits from automation are largely under control over the owners of it. And that ownership is for the purpose of making a profit. It is more profitable to automate as much as possible while simultaneously working the workers who are left as hard as possible, while paying the minimum amount to successfully do so.

This leads to a situation like we have in the U.S., where productivity has massively skyrocketed while median real wage has actually _decreased_ since the 70s. That median real wage means workers who can pay for less for a given hour for work, which means workers who need to work more _somewhere_ in order to support their conditions of work (pay for a place to live, pay for food, etc). Working more hours means getting less rest, which means less recovery, which means ::drumroll:: more chronic pain. The stats bear this out, and it's trivial to corroborate: The lowest-wage earners work more hours for less pay than they did fifty years ago, while percentage of take-home that goes to mortgage/rent has increased. This is a recipe for misery, and the most unbelievable thing about it is that it's not patently obvious to everyone. "Over-prescription" exists in those conditions: Pharma both has the incentive to sell more than is necessary, and no incentive to cure the actual _cause_ that bring people to seek a remedy for pain in the first place. "Partying", in this analysis, is not just a thing people "like to do" that they are now suddenly doing with more-abundant pain meds--it is a thing people are doing _with pain meds_ because those meds are _the thing that makes the general pain of being alive easier to deal with_, a thing large-scale abuse of substances (notably, alcohol) has been doing for thousands of years, where increased consumption has correlated strongly with increased human misery.

The party to addiction pathway is very regional, only affluent or hard-working teens can transverse that.