Quote:
Originally Posted by washoe
You might be underestimating this, these are numbers from 10 years ago and it has gotten much worse. Pharmas were sued because of the oxicontin scandal remember? That was opioids.
"Pooling data from 2002 to 2012, the incidence of heroin initiation was 19 times higher among those who reported prior nonmedical pain reliever use than among those who did not "
"A study of young, urban injection drug users interviewed in 2008 and 2009 found that 86 percent had used opioid pain relievers nonmedically prior to using heroin, and their initiation into nonmedical use was characterized by three main sources of opioids: family, friends, or personal prescriptions"
https://www.drugabuse.gov/publicatio...tor-heroin-use
I might be but I saw several different sources that estimated percentage of the population that was addicted to substances. They varied in dates. I looked at ones from 2012, 2017, 2018 and 2019, and one from back in like the eighties. It ranged between 9 and 10%.
Generally speaking, when one drug goes out of favor, another is there to take it's place. One of the devious things about opioids is, it likely creates more addicts than otherwise would have been created, because there might be folks whose is predisposed to addiction but who would never pick up a drug due to other intervention mechanisms, namely education and life experiences gained as a youth.
Maybe opioids is creating a higher percentage of addicts, but it's killing people quicker, and is much harder to come by than it used to be.