There was a big push in the '90s (partly out of genuine concern for patients and partly as guerrilla marketing for pharmaceutical companies) for doctors to trea

There was a big push in the '90s (partly out of genuine concern for patients and partly as guerrilla marketing for pharmaceutical companies) for doctors to treat pain as the "fifth vital sign", i.e. assess it routinely and move quickly to address any issues with it. When Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin, it was claimed to have low-to-no risk of dependence and abuse. This led to prolific use of prescription opioids for even minor pain. The dangerous thing about opioids is that they're equally effective for both physical and emotional pain, and everything else we have to treat emotional pain might as well be a placebo by comparison. So some people with chronic emotional pain got prescribed opioids for their physical pain post-injury/surgery and found that the experience of life on opioids is just better, and the only immediate options they have at that point are either to manage chronic opioid use or go back to their life constantly sucking. In such cases it's tempting to pontificate about "root causes", but in my experience people tend to steer that toward their own political/sociological/psychological hobby horses and quickly lose focus on the problem at hand. Also, while crack cocaine is far from harmless, its dangers have been overblown for political reasons, especially compared to the perception of powder cocaine.