Ohio Sues 5 Major Drug Companies For 'Fueling Opioid Epidemic'
I fear this is just another example from the century-long tradition of politicians exploiting addiction to get their names in the news.   A couple of years ago Johann Hari write a fine book on addiction and its legalities.<p><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/chasing-the-scream-the-first-and-last-days-of-the-war-on-drugs/oclc/881418255" rel="nofollow">http://www.worldcat.org/title/chasing-the-scream-the-first-a...</a><p>The US has systematically demonized addicted persons since the end of alcohol prohibition.  Demonizing them has served a few purposes.<p>1. promoting police employment and funding. The forerunner to the US DEA was the federal prohibition police force. Lately this has greatly expanded to include civil forfeiture.<p>2. separating people into us-vs-them classes. "Addicts are bad, so I'm good."   This was explicitly racist back when police and pols could get away with being explicitly racist.<p>3. giving US pols on the world stage the self-image of righteousness.<p>Now that the addiction epidemic has hit, well, white working, people, the demonization doesn't work as well as it did when it hit people who don't look like red-state attorneys general and governors. So ya gotta demonize somebody? Why not big pharma? They're a juicy target.<p>Look. Addiction sucks. It's hard to kick. It makes people weak, silly, and vulnerable. But it doesn't make them evil.