Citation? In palliative care, dosages can become incredibly high. The bit of info I've read has not talked about a maximum dose, nor have I heard stories about reaching such a level. (There probably is such a dose, just as there is for water, but I'm not sure it's been much of a hindrance to actual patients.)

An addiction has no reason to be expensive. Without being rude, I think you're just making that up. Using GoodRX, I've found that methadone is under half a cent per mg. So for a one-gram-a-day morphine equivalent (120mg methadone) that's a grand total of $18 a month. As comparison, 30mg methadone could (would?) kill a non tolerant user. If that's the current pricing, under all the extra regulatory work and reduced production due to legal limits, we'd expect it to drop. And spending just $200 a month, or 10x of the current price for 1G MED a day, seems not that bad, really.

You go from saying a dangerous, toxic, element such as lithium is OK because it improves the patient's life... to opiate treatment is bad because of addiction. That's it?

The US and Europe alone use about 100 tons of oxycodone, annually. Where is that all going? Yeah yeah, diversion is a "big deal", but even if it's massive, like 50%, most of it is going to the intended target. I'm not sure how production tonnage converts to personal usage, but at 40mg/day, that's about 6 million users. Total annual US prescriptions for opiates is in the quarter billion range (divide by 12 to get a rough estimate of users?) Yet oxycodone only created 175K hospital visits in a year. So we're at a hospitalization rate of only ~3% ? I think that destroys the idea that most users suffer tremendous damage from it. So what about the other 97%? The guy that did your taxes. The person who wrote the backbend of the next app you use? The old friend that just sits around in bliss? We should tell them to sod off because, hey, not all y'all is productive enough, and I don't like your living in an escape?

That 97% could be misleading. Massive over a 3 year usage cycle it's a different 3%, so perhaps 10% of users end up with a hospital event.

I knew people that died from OD. Perhaps because they couldn't get things together, and opiates were too big a call. Or maybe because they bought random quality shit and had no way to properly dose, plus their tolerance wasn't a nice chart due to constant pressure and stigmatization of their usage forcing them into period "rehab". Scenarios that would mostly disappear with proper production and social acceptance.

I also know many more people that have been opiate addicts for presumably a long time. Otherwise fine citizens, you might thing. Most people aren't willing to talk about their usage. But keep your eyes opened in meetings; look for the people with pinned eyes. Opiate addicts are everywhere. (6 million+ oxy users alone would be 2% of the US population.)

1: http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/drug-related...