Drug companies alleged to have flooded West Virginia with opioid painkillers
There&#x27;s something odd about this article. The opiod crisis <i>is</i> a crisis, and we should go about mitigating the consequences of having so many addicts (And stop creating new ones as much as possible.)<p>I think it&#x27;s because there are some hidden assumptions going on that the author just needs to come out and fess up to.<p>One, that drug companies should look at shipments per town as being an indicator of problems.<p>Two, that by shipping drugs, drug companies are causing the epidemic. They may be profiting from it, they may support legislation to make it worse, but it doesn&#x27;t take millions of pills to get hooked. This is a <i>result</i> of additiction, not a cause of it. You shut-off&#x2F;slow-down the pill flow, you just create a bigger black market. Addiction is a natural result of using opiods to treat pain. It is not caused by too many pills.<p>Three, that drug companies are the only people with agency here. Surely there are doctors, pharmacists, nurse-practitioners, ministers, social workers, and a slew of other people in these towns that are exposed to this problem every day. Many of them assist in the problem, either directly or through studied ignorance. This is a complex social problem with lots of players. Simplifying it to &quot;evil drug companies&quot; dumbs the problem down to the point of being intractable.<p>I&#x27;m not sure this article educated anybody as much as it made them upset. I&#x27;m struggling to find something useful and positive to say about how it could be improved. I sure don&#x27;t want drug companies using some kind of statistical process control to determine who can get pills or not. That&#x27;s whack.