Quote:
Originally Posted by DonkJr
You are falling into the same trap as Pointless. Of course there are some people that get addicted to narcotic painkillers, but you are making a pretty baseless assumption that anybody that takes more than a few pills will become an addict. What percentage of people that take painkillers get addicted? If it is 100%, then clearly they should never be prescribed. If it is 0%, then there is little drawback to prescribing painkillers en masse. The number is somewhere in between, which is why this gets more complicated than "nobody should take more than a few pills."
The thought that because people supposedly don't die from pain, therefore it is just fine to allow somebody to live with pain rather than prescribe a medication that would alleviate that pain, is a bizarre take for many reasons.
I don't know the percentage, but I know we have had a crisis with addictive drugs being pushed by a major pharmaceutical company, which caused lots of patients (and even some doctors) to become addicted. There was a big court case about it, maybe you heard about that.
Sounds good enough proof to be that they were being overprescribed by a lot.
And my understanding is that pretty much everyone who takes opiates for a good period of time becomes addicted. There aren't that many casual heroin or fentanyl users that I know of.