Thanks that's insightful. > My dad is a pharmacist in France where we treat drug addicts who want to recover as victims and help them get alternative subutex o

Thanks that's insightful. > My dad is a pharmacist in France where we treat drug addicts who want to recover as victims and help them get alternative subutex or methadone for free: he told me he never saw someone truly stop. They can reduce and live with it, but they cannot possibly stop. In the US it's different: opioids became a for profit pharmaceutical entreprise, and most of the crisis there is due to opium sold hidden as painkillers totally legally on a large scale. A refinement might be to tax legal painkillers that pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors and hospitals are prescribing to the populace from which they make profit from. The tax proceeds could then be used to pay for the inevitable rehabilitation of the certain percentage of the populace that is going inevitably get addicted to it. The refinement is that the general taxpaying populace doesn't have to pay for this out of the general funds, its explicitly the people profiting from the negative externality.