They are routinely administered in hospitals and for recovering from most traumatic injuries. For people who frame the use as episodic e.g. "until my leg heals

They are routinely administered in hospitals and for recovering from most traumatic injuries. For people who frame the use as episodic e.g. "until my leg heals" and try to get back to their lives as quickly as possible, there is rarely a problem. For some people the drugs are better than the life they had before and so getting off them is very difficult. They are a poor choice for chronic pain, since that population doesn't have particularly high life satisfaction. But they are an excellent choice for acute pain e.g post surgery, tooth extraction, etc. and people shouldn't be afraid of taking them in that context. The epidemic you have heard about in the US is incentivized malpractice. Doctors giving a class of drugs which should not be used habitually to people with shitty lives.