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.http://www.worldcat.org/title/chasing-the-scream-the-first-a...The US has systematically demonized addicted persons since the end of alcohol prohibition.  Demonizing them has served a few purposes.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.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.3. giving US pols on the world stage the self-image of righteousness.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.Look. Addiction sucks. It's hard to kick. It makes people weak, silly, and vulnerable. But it doesn't make them evil.