I think that the opiate abuse problem in America is real, even if the crisis narrative is being pushed for cynical commercial reasons. I have a friend who used to be hooked on painkillers, and the circumstances leading up to his addiction were almost exactly what you would hear described in any news article about “the white death.” By the way,. do you think that the advertising blitz for anti-constipation drugs (targeted towards opiate users) is part of the anti-opiates propaganda effort? Or just a way of cashing in on the massive target market that probably now exists?

The fact is that they are the *only* powerful painkillers, they are long since off patent, and nobody makes much money from them. There haven’t been any new classes of painkillers since non-aspirin NSAIDs many decades ago…

For many people the plain choice is severe pain – or opioids.

However, there are apparently some (on patent, expensive, dubiously effective) painkillers in the Big Pharma pipeline, which will soon need marketing.

My suspicion is that all these stories about opioid addiction are part of the process of clearing the market for the new drugs.

(Genuine progress would be welcome, of course! But in the past two or three decades Big Pharma has made extremely few effective new drugs. And ‘yet’ has made billions from, and flooded the market with, drugs that are inferior to existing off-patent drugs. eg ‘Atypical Antipsychotics’ which are metabolic toxins and cause massively increased death rates from physical illnesses and suicide (and are prescribed to young children, teens and vast numbers of adults. Abilify was the biggest grossing drug in the world a couple of years ago 6 billion dollars p/a).

Reports like the one below read as advertising copy, not science:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602141/the-painkillers-that-could-end-the-opioid-crisis/