Can we stop with the Big [insert capitalistic entity] already? I'm a regular listener of Dr. Drew Pinsky's podcasts. Aside from his celebrity doctor status, he

Can we stop with the Big [insert capitalistic entity] already? I'm a regular listener of Dr. Drew Pinsky's podcasts. Aside from his celebrity doctor status, he's an addiction medicine specialist and has treated addicts for decades. He knows a lot about opiod addiction and talks about it frequently; he's in the middle of making a documentary on it. One thing I've learned about the epidemic from him is that it is not primarily the result of a big pharma marketing push. The biggest factor was the right-to-be-pain-free movement of the 1990s. This was a movement initiated by lawsuits against doctors on the behalf of patients who wanted pain management via medication and happened back when it was very rare to get an opiod prescription. Doctors started getting sued for not providing their patients with enough pain relief and this resulted in a sea change in medicine. Pain management clinics emerged and the number of opiod prescriptions skyrocketed and the epidemic kicked off. Sure, the pharmaceutical companies benefitted from this, but they didn't create this, attorneys did.