I’ve been prescribed them before, and they’re not that fun/they’re difficult to abuse unless you have absolutely nothing to do with your life. That can’t be true of that many people though?
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The biggest issue with the current opioid crisis is that they were specifically marketed as non/less addictive than other painkillers on the market. That is why Purdue Pharma is in so much trouble right now – they knew the addictive nature of the opioids but marketed them falsely to enhance sales. Doctors overprescribed under the false assumption that they were safe to give to just about everyone. Patients took them under the advice of their doctor; I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to question the pills my doctor asks me to take – I just take them.
When doctors began to realize that their patients were getting hooked, they stopped prescribing them but the damage was done. Addiction is a nasty beast, and once you are hooked on opiates the DTs are **not** fun. Patients began going to drug dealers to get their opiate fix because they were addicts now.
The problem is that prescription opiates are very expensive on the black market (they are fairly hard to get ahold of, given how closely the FDA tracks prescription rates and how careful pharmacies are becoming in filling opiate prescriptions). Patients struggled to afford those opiates from their dealers, and the dealers were all too happy to offer a cheaper alternative opiate – heroin.
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