It’s not that something changed with opioids as a category, we’ve been using them forever. Drug companies made time release formulations of basically the same

It’s not that something changed with opioids as a category, we’ve been using them forever. Drug companies made time release formulations of basically the same compounds and said they weren’t as addictive as the stuff we used before and that wasn’t true. In the US Doctors tend to do what the patient wants, which you would expect from a free-market healthcare system. This leads to patients often asking for medications, in addition to marketing reps incentivizing physicians who want to make their patients happy as quickly as possible. I don’t see a clear parallel.