> The government restricting the supply of opioid painkillers has only served to push those who need them into the black market This is a pretty shallow summar

> The government restricting the supply of opioid painkillers has only served to push those who need them into the black market This is a pretty shallow summary of the actual state of affairs. Yes, people who need drugs have been forced into the black market. But so have people who are addicts. Legalizing might or might not help, but it doesn’t help to pretend that everyone is a chronic pain sufferer. The reality is that for decades many people were handed highly addictive painkillers for relatively minor pain (and for too long for acute pain). The end result is an epidemic of addiction. Those addictions didn’t evaporate when doctors started to reduce the frequency of opiate prescriptions. Hence the shocking reality that “opioid overdoses have increased as opioid prescriptions have decreased.” Well, yeah. A bunch of addicts have turned from Oxycodone to heroin.