Funny that I've been reading HN for years and never posted until an article about drugs, but that's how it goes sometimes. I was just talking about this with my

Funny that I've been reading HN for years and never posted until an article about drugs, but that's how it goes sometimes. I was just talking about this with my wife last night during an NPR story about opiod addiction and wondered if there was quantitative evidence about the cost/benefit ratio of opiods, as opposed to anecdotal stories, valuable as they might be. I found this article from a year ago: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/opioid-addiction-is-a-huge-problem-but-pain-prescriptions-are-not-the-cause/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/opioid-... Some key points, all direct quotes from the article: 1. Typically, young people who misuse prescription opioids are heavy users of alcohol and other drugs. This type of drug use, not medical treatment with opioids, is by far the greatest risk factor for opioid addiction 2. In general, new addictions are uncommon among people who take opioids for pain in general. A Cochrane review of opioid prescribing for chronic pain found that less than one percent of those who were well-screened for drug problems developed new addictions during pain care 3. The vast majority of people who are prescribed opioids use them responsibly—recent research on roughly one million insurance claims for opioid prescriptions showed that just less than five percent of patients misused the drugs by getting prescriptions for them from multiple doctors. 4. If we want to reduce opioid addiction, we have to target the real risk factors for it: child trauma, mental illness and unemployment. Two thirds of people with opioid addictions have had at least one severely traumatic childhood experience, and the greater your exposure to different types of trauma, the higher the risk becomes. 5. The reality, however, is that as long as there is distress and despair, some people are going to seek chemical ways to feel better. So in summary: I am NOT saying that you don't know someone who developed an opioid addiction without prior risk factors. I am saying that it seems in aggregate, this is a new phase of a common societal issue: lots of people are unhappy, for any number of reasons, and seek the most available fix. That used to be other drugs, then we cracked down on those drugs. Now it's opioids, and we're likely about to crack down on those. But something will be next, because we haven't solved the real problem.